So long-time readers (hey, you two) will remember a piece of doom and gloom I composed sometime in August or thereabouts titled simply ‘Debt.’ Well there’s been some better news since then, and it is the subject of an article I have in the latest edition of the Free Press (the release party is tomorrow night at SMOG).
The figures have been revised downwards since I composed the piece, but we’re still in the black. For the time being, anyway.
Remember to sign up for Budget Defense on the sheet on the Student Activities’ office door. Click ‘Read More’ to, well, you know.
The Peculiar Tale of How We Were but Are No Longer In Debt
Though it may be too late for the person who, upon reading the headline, leapt up onto their table in Kline to perform a celebratory dance, the title does not refer to your college loans. On that point, we’re still screwed. Sorry, folks.
The Student Association, however, is in a much better place than you are. We still don’t have enough money to cover even half of what clubs request, although we’re working on that one, but at least we’re in the black. This was not always certain, as through most of the summer months we were preparing to deal with a Convocation Fund that was between $20-30,000 in debt.
Actually, based on the assumptions we were operating under at the time, the actual number would have turned out to be $39,595.66, or a little under a third of the semesterly Activities Fee revenue. It would have been a terrible year, probably involving Student Government working off our arrears through manual labor of some kind.
Fortunately, we now have $2,541.23 in the bank, which will soon be supplemented by the about $130,000 generated by the $70 ‘Student Activities Fees,’ contributed by all of us.
So we have a clean slate and no debt. Isn’t that great? Like magic, everything worked out, and my summer stress was for naught. Well, not quite. Though we could just thank whatever deities we pray to and move on, this would be to ignore the many problems that got us into this position in the first place. So I’m going to go through the whole story of how we got into and out of debt.
The origins of the problems date back to 2005, when it was ‘discovered’ that the Student Association had a little over $82,000 in its account. In actuality, we had $115,743.37 in unspent funds, but we didn’t know this at the time. Though this discovery damaged our reputation for fiscal responsibility* in the eyes of the administration, students rejoiced at the pile of cash that had just fallen into their laps, and we wasted no time spending it. The semester after learning the news, $50,000 was spent on a costly SMOG expansion. By the end of Spring 2007, the money was gone.
What was left in its aftermath, however, was the idea that our resources were bottomless. Shortly after the discovery, Planning Committee, always caught between pressure from clubs and a miniscule convocation fund stretched too thin, began to allocate more money than we had, based on the historically accurate assumption that clubs would not spend all that they received.
This, I believe, was a fundamental error of method – instead of attempting to guess the amount clubs wouldn’t spend, Planning Committee should have induced clubs to spend money more efficiently by punishing those clubs that over-requested and reducing their subsequent allocations. Instead, however, the Committee was effectively making a semesterly gamble on how inefficient clubs would be.
Semester after semester, they guessed wrong, overspending by $6,684.99 in the 05-06 academic year, $4,426.39 in 06-07, $17,181.16 in 07-08, and $12,764.86 in 08-09. If we had been correct about the size of the Convocation Reserve in 2005, we would currently be about $40,000 in debt.
Here’s where the story turns around. As it turns out, the Reserve was far larger than anyone had known, about $33,000 than we had been assuming. We know this now because Kim Henschel, the Assistant Controller who now oversees the Convocation Fund, spent her summer figuring out exactly how much money we had.
The result of her labors is the chart [at left, right, above, below], which depicts the actual amount of money remaining in the Student Association coffers at the end of each of the last five academic years. At the end of it all, we had a little less than $6,000 in debt.
Yet Kim Henschel, Assistant Controller extraordinaire, did not stop there. There were also a series of outstanding checks that had never been cashed, which are now believed to have been duplication errors. By crediting the total of these checks back to us, we gained an additional $8,393.52, bringing us to a final figure of $2,541.23. Yes, a positive figure at long last.
Though the debt is gone, however, we’ve played our last Get Out of Jail Free card. Now we have to change course, because we can’t continue to overspend – there just isn’t any more money with which to bail us out.
We can do this by rectifying the mistakes of the past. We will rid Planning Committee of its gambling problem and only spend what we have, focusing our efforts on ensuring clubs efficiently use that money. The emergency fund will again be unallocated money, not money already allocated four or five times over.
We can do this by putting new safeguards in place. The Treasurer and Planning Committee will work to keep a closer eye on where our money is going, and at the recent club head day, we sketched out the details of a new check cutting procedure that will not only make the process more orderly and efficient, but also eliminate cash advances that allow your money to be put to ends that neither you nor us approved.
And finally, this year we will do something that’s been talked about for a while, but has not been done since 1991 – raising the Student Activities Fee. Our fee is less than half that at Vassar, resulting in a Convocation Fund that is ill-equipped to sustain the number and diversity of Bard’s clubs and student organizations.
In the end, we’re back where we started. This time around, however, we’ve learned from past mistakes, and won’t be repeating them.
*No, we have never, to this point, had such a reputation. This is something that we’re working very hard to change this year.
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