SG reallocates budget

When Student Government’s (SG) Activity & Service Recommendation Committee (ASRC) members created their budget in May, they forgot to account for several previous commitments, amounting to $1,602,694 needed in additional funding.

At Tuesday night’s Senate meeting, a revision was passed to use unallocated funds left over from the A&S budget to pay for the 16 items left off of the original SG budget.

Some of those items include payment for equipment in the new addition to the Campus Recreation Center and unbudgeted payroll for employees in Student Affairs, as well as SG members in the Senate and the Election Rules Commission.

“All the money they have goes into a big pot, and they take out the money that’s allocated for the different departments. But there’s this leftover, and that’s the unallocated money which isn’t set aside for anything,” Senate President Pro Tempore Khalid Hassouneh said.

The amount originally in the “pot” was about $3 million, leaving about $1.3 million after the new allocations.

Hassouneh said the payroll for the Senate and judicial branch was not included in the budget because they incorrectly budgeted the number of weeks they would be working.

“They budgeted for 35 weeks in a year, when everybody knows there is 52 weeks in a year,” he said. “Take out the holidays that we have, and that give us 43 business weeks.”

The discrepancies lie with the 2009-10 ASRC, he said.

“You can point fingers, but at the end of the day, we all reviewed the bills. I am ashamed that I didn’t catch it,” said College of Education Sen. Rachel Brown, the current chairwoman for the 2010-11 ASRC.

No new items were added to the budget, Hassouneh said, and although the spending is last minute, it should not place SG in debt.

“It is all something that we have been committed to,” he said. “(Most of) the items that needed funded were discussed in the minutes, and in the notes, but for some reason they weren’t included in the final budget.”