The Association of Student Representatives held its annual budget meeting for the chartered organizations, commonly referred to as the Big Six, on Trinity University’s campus on Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m.
Trinity’s chartered organizations include Student Ambassadors, Student Programming Board, Trinity Diversity Connection, Greek Council, Trinity University Volunteer Action Community, Rec Sports and Campus Publications.
During the meeting, the leaders of each organization presented their budget proposals for the 2012-2013 academic year. Senators then reviewed the proposals and asked questions.
This year’s meeting had a different tone because of the increased student activity fee. The increase affected the amount of money ASR had to allocate to groups. Given that the fee increased from $90 to $150, there was a significantly larger pool of money from which to fund the chartered organizations
Because of the increase, ASR has begun to shift from looking at the cost of proposals to the ideas behind the proposals. Likewise, the chartered organizations have begun to propose new programs and activities that they would like to pursue.
Several such requests were made during Wednesday’s meeting. Among them, the Student Programming Board requested a funding increase that would allow them to book bigger name bands and performers for the Welcome Week Concert. They also plan to increase their amount of programming to provide more options for students looking for something to do on the weekends.
Greek Council requested a larger budget in order to fund their new leadership initiatives. The initiatives include bringing in more speakers as well as sending students to conferences and expanding their pre-existing programming.
Many of the other groups were also interested in increasing their funding in order to take more students to conferences.
Campus Publication’s budget remained largely the same as previous years. However, they requested a large sum of money from the Capital Equipment Fund in order to replace and update the computers and software currently used in the newsroom. The amount they requested, if granted, would use up nearly a third of the Capital Equipment Fund.
The Capital Equipment Fund is a fund separate from the fund that the student activity fee supplies. However, due to the expense associated with Campus Publication’s equipment request, ASR decided to table the issue until a future meeting when they could devote a sufficient amount of time to discussing it.
The Rec Sports funding request did not receive much debate. The details of this budget were worked out in advance when the university increased the student activity fee and revamped the club sports/ recreational sports system.
When all of the groups finished their proposals, ASR went through each group’s request individually and evaluated how much money they were asking for, what they planned to do with it and how that amount of money compared with what they requested in previous years.
Once these discussions were over, the meeting concluded. ASR will vote on the specific amount they will fund each chartered organization during their next meeting. All students are welcome and encouraged to attend.
