[1220] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
UA funding
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sarah Farrar)
Thu Mar 14 17:32:13 2002
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20020314170353.00c2c300@po12.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 17:27:23 -0500
From: Sarah Farrar <safarrar@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
Hi Jeremy,
I don't remember who all else asked about how the UA spends its money, but
feel free to forward this if you like. The UA Budget is not confidential by
any means; it's presented openly at the second Council meeting of every
term. Finboard results are usually even printed in the Tech.
Let's just use some *very* round numbers here. Every year, the UA is given
about $200K, which it then splits into $100K per semester. On average, the
UA then takes about $5K for its operational budget. Usually this is higher
in the fall than in the spring, maybe by as much as another $5K
approximately. (This current semester is a special case; the UA only took
$180 for itself because of previous unspent funding remaining in our
account.) The UA jointly supports the ASA with the GSC only in the fall
term, so I'm ignoring that for the rest of this. Then the Class Council
budgets and the UA Council Discretionary fund (used for student group
emergencies later in the semester) are subtracted off. This plus the
previous corresponding term's rollover gives the total given to Finboard to
allocate. We now have begun overallocating on that total to increase
student group spending, and that has worked very well so far. In short:
$100K semesterly allowance
-$5K UA operating budget
-$25K Class Councils
-$2K Council Discretionary
= $68K to Finboard
+ previous corresponding term's rollover, on the order of $30K before we
began overallocation --> now down to about $10K
= $98K to Finboard, previously
+ some overallocation percentage determined each semester
= total allocated to student groups, usually about $120K
In addition to the semesterly allowance that the UA uses, we have other
sources of funding that have been allocated. For example, several years ago
a lot of money accumulated, which we have now been spending down on capital
expenditures, such as the aforementioned support to athletics. We also just
gave something like $18K to Student Cable and $10K to the Student Emergency
Medical Services Group (which is doing confidential transport). You can
check out the UA webpages on Council legislation and meeting minutes to
read more about these things: http://web.mit.edu/ua/www
I hope that clears things up. Please feel free to email me if you have any
more questions. I am in no way responsible for tracking the Bush Fund, so I
can't give you any details on that.
saf:)
Sarah Farrar
UA Treasurer
Finboard Vice-Chair
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Documentation on the use of the mailing lists mit-talk, all-talk,
mit-news, housing-talk, and the mit-talk Zephyr class is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/institvte/talk/
