USG President Gabe Savage and Vice President Trinity Moore presented their proposed budget, in which many student organizations had funding cut significantly, at their weekly Tuesday meeting.
For Fall 2020, USG is working with a budget of just under $550,000, according to a document shared in the meeting. For comparison, the organization had $2.43 million at their discretion for the 2019-20 academic year. If next semester’s budget is similar to this semester’s, the total budget for 2020-21 would be a little less than half of what it was the previous year.
The major budget cut comes from the cost of student programming fees, which were reduced from $65 per student to $13 this semester. USG calculated their Student Programming Fee allocation by multiplying the fee by the enrollment.
Savage said USG was not made aware of the budget cut until weeks into the semester.
“It’s frustrating because the budget cuts were disappointing, but not extremely difficult,” Savage said in an interview with Annenberg Media. “It would have been quite easy if we knew about this coming into the semester.”
Mandatory allocations such as student stipends and staff salaries, which take up nearly three-quarters of their expenses, had to remain the same because they were written into the bylaws.
USG did make sacrifices. The administration costs, which usually handle office supplies and printing, were “wiped clean”, according to Savage. Because everyone is currently remote, USG found the previous allocation of $53,000 unnecessary. Development, which covers retreats and USG merch like water bottles and sweatshirts, was also non-existent.
“It’s just not going to happen this semester,” Savage said during the meeting. “Maybe, I don’t want to say anything about the spring, but, I think we’re in times of great need right now, and those just seemed like quick places where we budget by a pretty substantial amount. Those two line items together saved us about $100,000.”
The programming department allocations were based on the initial ask from each organization. Black Student Assembly recieved $31,000 compared to last year’s $37,000, Latinx Student Assmebly $25,000 compared to last year’s $35,000, Queer and Ally Student Assembly $18,000 compared to last years $32,000 and Asian Pacific American Student Assembly $13,700 compared to last year’s $38,500.
“We understand that these may look lopsided, but every single dollar we allocated, we allocated for programming that was already planned,” said Savage in the meeting. “And in our eyes, they would not happen if we didn’t make the adjustments that we did.”
The Concert Committee had the largest allocation at $95,000 for this semester, representing about a sixth of what the organization was operating with last academic year. However, this money was spent on the homecoming concert before the budget was made.
Bylaws also state that $5,000 has to come out of the executive/legislative account in order to fund new assemblies. Savage mentioned they’ve allocated enough to fund 3 new assemblies while having $2,500 left over to move around in the budget.
The proposed budget does not use all funds available to USG. Savage said they are intentionally rolling over some of the funding so that the organization will have at least about the same amount of funds for Spring 2021 as they did for this semester.
“Our hope is that at the absolute bare minimum, in terms of what our budget could look like next semester, it’ll be about $255,000 plus that remaining rollover,” he said at the USG meeting.