The university’s student fee allocation committee voted to approve a budget increase for campus transportation in a Monday meeting, which members said was driven by students’ increasing usage of city bus services.
In a meeting last week, the Student Transportation Board presented in front of the Student Services Finance Committee, proposing a 5 percent increase from last year’s budget.
“I think that we’re looking at an incredibly austere budget,” SSFC representative Cale Plamann said. “This is the first time I’ve suggested adding money and have been told not to.”
During their presentation, the board discussed their plans to decrease advertisement costs and emphasized their increased budget reflected students’ increasing Madison Metro ridership.
“Everything that we as a committee want covered is covered,” Plamann said. “It reflects the positions that we have taken as a committee and that the transportation board has taken. We should back the transportation board up.”
The Student Transportation Program Budget received almost unanimous support from SSFC members who voted on the budget during the meeting.
SSFC Vice Chair Chase Wilson said he was impressed with how quickly the board came up with a proposal. Wilson also said the body had a very limited amount of time to craft the budget.
“I am in favor of the budget as it stands,” Wilson, who is also a member of the Student Transportation Board, said. “It should be voted through as-is. It’s good in terms of future negotiations with future transportation services.”
SSFC members also discussed how to amend their bylaws during the meeting. The committee broke down into subcommittees in order to address the issues.
Currently there are problems concerning how to deal with violations of legislative policy, Rep. Laura Checovich said.
“When people break the rules of the SSFC there are certain violations based on how severe and how many times they’ve broken a rule,” Checovich said. “We found that the violation standards were too severe.”
Checovich said currently there is one set of punishments for all violations. This scale of punishments encompasses all types of policy violations, which can range from wage issues to problems with advertising ASM. The violation committee plans to change the standards for next year’s committee.
During Monday’s meeting, there was also discussion of changing what should constitute the definition of an event. Currently there is some confusion in the legislation as to what is and is not considered an event, Checovich said.
“Currently the legislation is convoluted, which makes our bylaws difficult to understand,” Checovich said. “It would easier to [decide] what series of events are allowed rather than what is not allowed. I worry this is an issue that this will come up again in a few years that we could have fixed now.”
