Taxation without representation: How are the Student Activities Fees used?
Bianca Nery
Issue date: 11/16/06 Section: News
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What is the purpose of a budget if it isn't dusted off and looked at once in awhile?
There seems to be a great disparity among the items in Student Activities Fee budget and the amount of money actually spent. As reported in the October edition of The Argonaut, students are forced to pay a Student Activities Fee of about $100 every semester. Last year, the school received about $193,000 from the fees, which was in turn allocated to different accounts, representing different aspects of student programming.
In The Argonaut's ongoing examination of last year's record of expenditures from the student activities fee budget, it's clear that all 27 accounts within the student activities budget (with the exception of ASNDNU and the Residence Hall Association) are commingled with no individual trail of accountability for a single account.
For example, the budget allotted $35,000 for the Programming Board but that board actually spent about $60,000. However, no one is particularly concerned about the overspending because the total amount spent from the Student Activities Fee budget was only about 4 percent over budget.
If one line item exceeds its budget, some other line item made up for it.
According to Rich Watters, the director of the Center for Student Leadership, a possible explanation for this is that the university lumped different accounts together. Although there is money allocated to all the accounts on the Student Activities Fee budget, not all of them are currently in existence, specifically the cultural, leadership, campus life programming and the leadership minor budget.
"I mentioned earlier that the university hasn't yet established the account lines. I don't know the exact reasons, but those are happening at the vice president level," said Watters. "We are trying to get the lines established."
In turn, expenditures that were supposed to be taken from those accounts were then taken from other existing accounts.
There seems to be a great disparity among the items in Student Activities Fee budget and the amount of money actually spent. As reported in the October edition of The Argonaut, students are forced to pay a Student Activities Fee of about $100 every semester. Last year, the school received about $193,000 from the fees, which was in turn allocated to different accounts, representing different aspects of student programming.
In The Argonaut's ongoing examination of last year's record of expenditures from the student activities fee budget, it's clear that all 27 accounts within the student activities budget (with the exception of ASNDNU and the Residence Hall Association) are commingled with no individual trail of accountability for a single account.
For example, the budget allotted $35,000 for the Programming Board but that board actually spent about $60,000. However, no one is particularly concerned about the overspending because the total amount spent from the Student Activities Fee budget was only about 4 percent over budget.
If one line item exceeds its budget, some other line item made up for it.
According to Rich Watters, the director of the Center for Student Leadership, a possible explanation for this is that the university lumped different accounts together. Although there is money allocated to all the accounts on the Student Activities Fee budget, not all of them are currently in existence, specifically the cultural, leadership, campus life programming and the leadership minor budget.
"I mentioned earlier that the university hasn't yet established the account lines. I don't know the exact reasons, but those are happening at the vice president level," said Watters. "We are trying to get the lines established."
In turn, expenditures that were supposed to be taken from those accounts were then taken from other existing accounts.
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