Smart Alec | End the over-budgeting crisis

The Student Activities Council is going bankrupt.

Its leaders have sent SAC on the fiscal equivalent of a debauched bender for the last five years. Now the hangover commences. The one thing that won’t help is the one thing the SAC Executive Committee has decided to do — a moratorium on new groups. This will do nothing to ameliorate the crisis. It is useful only as a warning of the huge cuts to come.

How did this crisis come about? The answer is more complicated than “everyone asked us for money,” which is SAC’s preferred answer (imagine if this was an acceptable reason for budget crises in a real government). It starts with the SAC reserve fund, in which all the unspent money in student government — from student groups and from student-government branches like Social Planning and Events Commitee — is pooled at the end of every year. The reserve fund is a cushion for SAC; think of it as a rainy-day fund.

Up until about 2006, the SAC reserve fund had about $450,000 and that amount remained steady, according to figures from the Office of Student Affairs. Then SAC started dipping into its reserves — after all, the reserve fund had all that money. New, more generous guidelines were adopted. By last year, all restraint had collapsed. The Executive Committee proposed a budget that not only spent all of its historic increase from the Undergraduate Assembly but also drained $170,000 from the reserve fund. Now just over $100,000 is left — more than $300,000 has been spent in four years.

Why such recklessness? College senior and former SAC chairwoman Ali Huberlie noted candidly that she and her Executive board members just weren’t willing to make cuts. Nor were they willing to seriously penalize groups that went into debt. The reason they gave was that groups deserved more money than SAC was budgeted — a view enthusiastically endorsed by the groups. But thinking you deserve more money is no reason to spend money you don’t have, and it was this decision by generations of SAC executives that has landed us in this mess. For sure, more debt and more groups have added weight. But it was its refusal to spend within its means — a refusal to make hard choices — that was SAC’s original sin.

Enacting a moratorium on new groups is exactly the one measure that will do nothing to help the current crisis. Too much money is going out to existing groups. Even if SAC adds no new groups for the whole year, it still must find a way to patch a $170,000 hole in its year-to-year budget. It will do so by forcing indebted groups to raise revenue and by cutting funding, most likely for costly club-sport travel and publication printing.

What is needed in the long term is a full, expert study, conducted by brilliant fiscal analysts — I hear we have this school or something with lots of them — who can model the financial impact of SAC recognition, de-recognition, debt and the impact of SAC budgeting decisions. A moratorium makes this study harder, not easier, since it disrupts emerging trends necessary to understand what is actually going on with SAC.

But beyond the study, in the short term, there is a simple, fair solution to the SAC crisis: the SAC Executive Board should follow its own constitution and budget strictly within the money given to it by the UA, even if this means giving groups less than the guidelines require. The UA should allocate SAC more money, by all means, but the reserve fund should return to its role as an emergency fund, breached only in extraordinary circumstances. This will mean cuts for everyone, and tough choices, but a transparent process that involves every SAC group — not just SAC leaders — can create the political will necessary to return to saner times.

SAC should gird itself to make the real, tough choices to restore probity to its balance sheet. This moratorium is not one of them.

Alec Webley is a College senior and former chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly. His e-mail address is webley@theDP.com. Smart Alec appears every Thursday.

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