All semester we have been advocating to the Student Services Finance Committee (SSFC) to be responsible when doling out student tax dollars. While we feel SSFC could have done a much better job protecting students, SSFC has for the most part taken the time to look at the budgets.

In fact, SSFC wasted over an hour during one meeting to discuss whether to cut $400 (that is $0.005 per student per semester) from the Polygon budget. Yet when SSFC took a look at their own budget, fiscal discipline went out the window.

SSFC increased the vice chair salaried position from $1,900 to $2,200 a year, but also significantly reduced the vice chair’s workload. No longer is the vice chair responsible for taking minutes or dealing with information requests. The responsibilities now lie with the newly-formed secretarial position; this new secretary will be paid $1,500 a year.

While this seems like a waste of money, it is miniscule compared to the other increases. At the last minute, SSFC decided to add another professional staffer who will be paid $47,000 per year. The necessity and duties of this “advisor” to SSFC remains vague. SSFC would have been unlikely to approve such a position for any other organization if they had proposed such a vague job description.

This line-item was not in the original budget submitted to SSFC committee members, and when inquired the evening before the budget decision, SSFC Chair Aaron Werner made no mention of this addition. Ironically, it was not too long ago when Werner criticized at least one organization for playing games with their budget. It turns out Werner is a gamester with his budget as well.

Just as disturbing as Werner’s slick move was the absences of SSFC members Pete McCabe and Lindsey Ourada during the portion of the hearing when the SSFC budget was decided. If these committee members had been working on a class project or studying for an exam, that would have been fully understandable. But, alas, this was not the case in this situation. Rather, these committee members chose to ignore their responsibilities to the student body and instead went to debate the proposed increase in minimum wage.

The approximately 100 percent increase in their own budget kicks SSFC’s funding to a whopping $100,710. SSFC’s new budget is higher than 75 percent of the organizations SSFC funds through allocable seg-fees. While most of these other organizations claim to offer a service to students of this University, SSFC’s sole function is to raise your taxes, and now even that is going to cost students more.

SSFC needs to take a good look in the mirror and start holding its own committee’s budget to at least the same standard as the committee is holding every other student group. Thus far, they have failed to do so and every seg-fee funded group should be outraged.

2003-04 Approved Budgets

Multicultural Student Coalition $466,050

Diversity Education Program (DEP) $389,600

UW-Madison Student Radio Station $277,213

Safe Arrival for Everyone (SAFE) $242,847

Asian & Pacific American Council $178,797

ASM SSFC $100,710*

Adventure Learning Program $98,962

GUTS $84,533

Wunk Sheek $80,378

WISPIRG $77,600

CFACT $69,250

Campus Women’s Center $65,865

Tenant Resource Center (TRC) $58,421

LGBT $51,021

ASM Student Judiciary $44,800

Sex Out Loud $42,419

MEChA $40,521

Rape Crisis Center (RCC) $36,750

Student Leadership Program (SLP) $31,311

Vets for Vets $27,700

PAVE $22,578

Legal Information Center $16,977

College of Ag & Life Sci Student Council $10,001

Polygon Engineering Student Council $6,100

*= 2004-05 Approved Budget