Student Senate’s discretionary funding nearly all used up

Student groups seeking funding before KU’s Student Senate next semester will be getting a little more scrutiny than those that made requests earlier this year.

The senate has already burned through much of its available funds for the year, leaving a relatively small amount remaining for the spring semester.

The student body allocates funding for a variety of different student functions, including funding for student activities, clubs and guest speakers.

Up until last week, the senate had approved all the requests that it received, said Alex Porte, student body treasurer and a junior from Great Falls, Va.

“I would definitely attribute our funding situation to our senate’s lack of fiscal responsibility,” Porte said. “But blame cannot be laid at any one person’s feet for what’s happened.”

The senate collects its money from a $17.50 student fee. Porte said that fee generated about $850,000 this year. The senate allocates most of that fee before each new academic year begins. Then during the academic year, the senate deals with the remaining unallocated portion.

This year, Porte said that amounted to about $110,000.

Brian Hardouin, a third-year law student from Denver, is on the senate’s finance committee.

He said following a meeting Wednesday that about $12,000 of the senate’s original $110,000 remained available to spend. In a typical year, he said, the senate has about 40 percent of its available funds to spend headed into the second semester.

Porte said “it takes a lot of moxie” to tell a student group that it cannot have the funding it’s requesting, but it’s something that will have to happen moving forward.

Last week, Hardouin said, the senate rejected two requests for the first time this year, including one to fund an engineering group seeking to build a concrete canoe for a competition. It also cut some funding amounts to a lower scale — something Hardouin said had been done earlier, but only when a group had violated senate regulations.

Hardouin and Porte both called for new regulations that would restrict the amount of funding that groups could receive.

Porte said one funding request approved earlier that had attracted scrutiny in retrospect was for more than $10,000 to fund Jayhawk Motorsports, a group that builds a car from scratch every year.

While that group got most of its money from other sources, Hardouin said the request to Student Senate was much larger than most of the $1,000 requests the senate gets from other student groups.

“There aren’t enough measures in place for people to cut a bill down,” he said.

Porte said that while most groups tend to apply for funding at the beginning of the year or during the first semester, there are always exceptions.

One such exception is KU’s From the Inside Out club, which plans to apply early next semester to have a guest speaker come to campus to discuss body art.

It’s a great event, Porte said, one that would probably bring 150 to 200 students to hear the speaker. But, with so little funding available, he said it was much less likely the senate would approve the $3,000 bill than if the request had been made earlier.

Groups coming forth for funding will just have to plead their case a little stronger next semester, Hardouin said.

“The group is just going to have to illustrate that students are going to get the most bang for their buck,” he said.

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