I’ve been putting off this post for a while. I’ve been telling myself that the reason is that I’m still waiting to receive exact figures from Kim Henschel, but it’s largely because I’m not looking forward to writing it.

So here’s the situation. The Student Association is in debt. Kinda heavily. To the tune of somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 dollars.

I’ll let that one sink in for a moment. When it does, join me after the jump.

A sneak preview of the coming semester

As we near the budgeting process for next fall, Travis McGrath and I will update this site with information on how Planning Committee will reckon with the morass in which we find ourselves and what safeguards we’re implementing to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. But this post will be about how we got where we are, because I’m sure many students’ first response to this news will be to ask, as did I, ‘How on earth did this happen?’

This is no simple question to answer, as it is the result of a combination of factors ganging up on us simultaneously. But though some of these factors were mistakes made by our predecessors, this post is not intended to be a foray into the ‘blame game.’ My hope is that an earnest and thorough exploration, if not explanation, of the past will obviate both your and my desire to get angry at someone, instead allowing us to focus on some tough choices that lie ahead.

The origins of the crisis date back to 2005, when it was ‘discovered’ that the Student Association had a little over $82,000 in its account. 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. The figure was over-reported in campus publications as “about $100,000,” 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. At some point, 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. In Fall 2007, the Committee allocated about 25% more money than it had to distribute.  But though that number seems large, poor money management made this assumption reasonable – clubs, it turned out, did not use the extra 25%, despite requesting far more.  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.

Over the next two years, the size of Planning Committee’s gamble increased to the point where last semester, it allocated almost 37% more money than we had, an excess allocation of over $40,000.

In part, this was the result of faulty math. In the published budget, the Committee only admitted to allocating $22,754.39 more than the Convocation Fund. There were two problems with the math, one deliberate, the other a mistake. The deliberate error was to not include the Emergency Fund in this total. The Emergency Fund is the amount of money left unallocated in case something unexpected happens. However, the Fund, a meager $4,000, is usually spent in full by the end of the semester, so it is disingenuous to not include it in the total, as was usually done in the past.

The mistake was that instead of using the amount of Activities Fee revenue the Student Association would receive that semester, the figures were based off of the amount remaining in the Convocation Fund. However, some of the amount remaining had already been allocated the previous semester. Here’s why – unspent funds allocated in the Fall semester are still available to the clubs that requested them in the Spring semester. Unspent funds are only returned to the Student Association at the end of each year.  In this way, Planning Committee failed to account for some $15,000 of already allocated money. A handful of large check requests later, we found ourselves deep in debt.

Our fiscal reputation had still not recovered after the discovery of the 82k. As late as this Spring, Dimitri Papadimitriou was still using it as a reason to disallow us from increasing the Student Activities Fee, despite the fact that it had been long since spent. This semester, it will fall to Travis McGrath, David Silberberg, and I to launch salvage operations.

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. We will soon have information up on an expected overhaul of the check request process.

And finally, this semester we will do something that’s been talked about for years, 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.

However, this year we have limited resources.  Fortunately, Kevin Parker, Bard’s comptroller, has agreed to allow us to split up repayment of the debt between the next two semesters, but between that repayment and cutting out the irresponsible over-allocation of last year, the number at the bottom of next semester’s budget is going to be reduced by about a third. When the semester starts, we’ll be having lots of discussions with club heads about how best to deal with this situation, but that’s the bottom line.

On the plus side, I have no more bad news.

Tags: Clubs, Convocation Fund, Debt, Emergency Fund, Planning Committee, Student Activities Fee, Student Association Budget, Treasurer

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Issues, Student Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.