A new ranking system could change how student organizations receive money from Student Association as part of one of three goals that SA President Neal Casey made for this semester.

Casey said he aimed to improve the budget process, include students in SA’s decision-making process and make SA a results-based organization. With the new session getting underway, Casey and members of SA are now attempting to create concrete results from these broad goals.

During Monday’s SA meeting, the Assembly will vote on this semester’s financial vision, a guide set each year for the Finance Board to follow during budget season. This year’s version is much more detailed and hopefully clearer than those of past years, Casey said.

‘We knew that there were many issues that need to be fixed,’ Casey said.

One major addition to the financial vision is a programming-capital tier system. The system would rank student organizations in four different tiers, which would have different limits on funding, by looking at how many successful events an organization has put on in the past.

If chosen to receive funding, new organizations or ones without a history of successful programming would start out on the first tier, which provides a maximum of $5,000 per event, said Jeff Rickert, SA’s comptroller.

Organizations with successful programming would move up to the second, third and ultimately fourth tier, which provide a maximum of $12,000, $25,000 or unlimited potential resources per event, respectively, he said.

But the system does not guarantee that every student organization will receive funding. The money SA gives to organizations each semester does not nearly match the amount that organizations request. Student organizations requested a total of $1.3 million in the fall, but SA only had $700,000 to give out. With that kind of press for money, SA members have to make sure that they are not letting a dollar go to waste, Rickert said.

There was nothing as explicit or detailed in previous years as the tier system, Rickert said.

‘Everyone would just look at the comptroller at the time and say, ‘Has this group done any programming before?” he said.

SA begins each session with a $2 million budget. Out of this, about $800,000 goes to the operating budgets of organizations such as SA, CitrusTV and Student Legal Services. After that, the remaining $1.2 million is split up, with about $700,000 available for organizations’ events in the spring semester and the other $500,000 reserved for events in the fall, Rickert said. 

Last semester, about 70 organizations received funding, and about five of them had issues that resulted in wasted money, Rickert said. Wasted money does not happen a lot, but it does happen more than he would like to see it happening, he said.

‘That was one of my big things: I didn’t think that we should be giving money to groups that weren’t operating successfully,’ Rickert said.

To address the goal of including more students in the decision process, SA is planning town hall meetings around campus. Students will be able to express ideas and concerns in an open forum, something SA has done in the past. They will be working with the Residence Hall Association, said Jen McKay, chair of the Student Engagement Committee.

The town hall meetings are another medium to find out what students want, and SA will hopefully benefit greatly from them, Casey said.

For the final goal of making SA a more results-based organization, Casey was optimistic that the attitude of SA’s cabinet and assemblymembers was what would make this session successful.

‘In the past, SA has judged itself on what it’s working on. We want to focus on what we accomplish,’ Casey said. ‘It was great to see that they’re all just as excited as I am.’

spcotter@syr.edu

Published on January 23, 2011 at 12:00 pm