[78] in UA Discuss
Re: UA budgeting principles
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rachel Meyer)
Fri Nov 6 19:06:00 2009
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:49:27 -0500
From: Rachel Meyer <remeyer@MIT.EDU>
To: ua-senate@mit.edu
Cc: ua-discuss@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <6ed15f040911061003s24dced28ib503a25c488349d8@mail.gmail.com>
Some responses to various past statements:
> more closed ones (from student groups) that tend to benefit fewer people.
Each group may reach less people, but student groups /as a whole/ reach wider
and more directly than many, if not all, UA projects.
> Anyway, when was the last time student groups as a whole did
> this at all of their meetings? Not one or two sporadic cases, but all of
> them? It is unreasonable to force us into this when the organizations to
> which the surplus funding would be transferred do not and will not do
> anything like it.
I'm not completely sure what you mean by "did this at all of their meetings,"
but I think you mean pay for their own food.
It is Finboard policy that groups do not receive funding for group meetings.
I don't have hard/complete data on this, but based on my familiarity of
groups*,
to pay for food groups either:
- charge dues
- have people pay for food at meetings (either by donation or charge)
- run on campus fundraisers
- hold potlucks
- have member(s) personally host and pay for food
- get outside sponsors
*This is based on both my personal/direct experience with about 15 groups and
familiarity with dozens more groups as ASA President. ASA is planning on
collecting more specific data on this in the future.
> Anyway, if the extra money were allocated to student groups, much of it
> would just go toward paying for food at their events, which tend to be much
> less public and much less ecumenical.
Do you have data or other evidence to support this?
I do not have explicit data, but based on my experience with Finboard and
student groups I do not think this is true or it at least not in the extreme
terms you state.
> I am curious about why ASA specifically has such massive food expenses,
> though -- I'm not involved enough with it personally to know the answer to
> this, but I would like to.
1. ASA submitted a budget for the entire fiscal year, not just one semester,
but only requested that half of that money be allocated now.
2. Our per meeting expense for board meetings may also be higher than some
committees. That is due to 2 things:
- we are a larger committee than most: 10 people on the board, potentially
more people attending when we are discussing LEF/ARCADE or other projects
- our meetings are longer than most (if not all) committee's: most committee
meetings are an hour or less, our shortest meetings are an hour and half and
meetings have many times (in the last year or two) lasted three or four hours
or taken the form of all day work-sessions.
3. We are trying to make our meetings very explicitly open. We have been
announcing meetings regularly on asa-minutes@mit.edu and with some exceptions
all of our discussions are open. Because of this I think we have had more
non-members attending our meetings than most committees.
4. The GBM food line item is high, but that is because those are
meetings that
every group is required to send a representative to. There are about 450
groups and we usually get at least 200 people at these meetings (people can
represent multiple groups).
> Also, if we can't hand off PLUS by next year, I
> would like to see its allocations significantly reduced as I said earlier --
> it is way too expensive for the number of people participating in it, and I
> feel that doing so would be a good example of conceivably significant
> benefit to student groups without serious detriment to services rendered to
> the student body as a whole by the UA.
I agree.
> You asked for guidance. I had already mentioned a number of these
> things in previous messages, but since you seem to be implying that I must
> not care if I do not restate myself, I have done so.
1. Guidance means more than just what individuals say on a mailing list. One
or two people can't speak for Senate - I'm not sure if it needs to be
an actual
piece of legislation, but it at least needs to be discussed by more people.
2. Nobody is trying imply that people need to restate themselves in email to
prove that they care. If anything, I would guess that it is more important to
Alex and the Special Budgetary Committee to get more new and different
thoughts
from more people (if not something officially from Senate) and/or to have some
legislation proposed in Senate.
>>> * Move fall budgeting back to the spring?
To bring up another idea... I think this would be a very interesting thing to
try so that committees could have enough time to plan for
projects/events after
knowing their approved budget. However, their are some potential issues (that
I'm not sure how big of a deal they'd be):
- lack of time between committee chairs being appointed/approved and a budget
needing to be in
- not having the full committees together yet to give input to the budgets
- having one session of Senate approve the budget to be used for the next
session
Sorry for the long and choppy email.
-Rachel
Quoting Ted Hilk <thilk@MIT.EDU>:
> As I stated earlier, I would be averse to cutting back on events and
> projects that benefit many people (e.g. things like what special projects
> and sustainability are doing, among *many* others) in favor of more closed
> ones (from student groups) that tend to benefit fewer people. I would like
> to see costs for athletics weekend reduced substantially, though, as I also
> mentioned, because its rather high expenses seem disproportionate to the
> degree of benefit that it provides.
>
> Also, I emphatically do not like the idea of requiring individual Senators
> to pay for the food at Senate/committee meetings (as would be implied by the
> "collection bucket" that you cited above), since Senate meetings are open to
> the public and providing food might help draw people in and get them to pay
> more attention to UA issues, and because (since they are public), individual
> Senators should not have to personally cover costs for everyone wishing to
> attend. This problem of a shared commons could conceivably apply within the
> UA as well. Anyway, when was the last time student groups as a whole did
> this at all of their meetings? Not one or two sporadic cases, but all of
> them? It is unreasonable to force us into this when the organizations to
> which the surplus funding would be transferred do not and will not do
> anything like it.
>
> Regardless, since many committees act primarily on policy matters, the
> proportion of their individual budgets spent on food is completely
> irrelevant. By your standard, a committee that spent no money on food but
> $10,000 on an event would be considered superior to one that spent $150 on
> food, no money on anything else, and singlehandedly convinced a key
> administrative committee to consider more student input. Obviously, such a
> budgetary standard is flawed.
>
> Anyway, if the extra money were allocated to student groups, much of it
> would just go toward paying for food at their events, which tend to be much
> less public and much less ecumenical. Implementing a standardization system
> for Senate/committee meetings would have a lot of pitfalls, from inflation
> to the number of meetings per committee to disagreements about what
> constitutes sufficient funding per meal to what time of day the meetings are
> held. Additionally, I suspect that the person implementing the system would
> have a vested interest in decreasing expenditures, which would bias the
> process significantly. Lastly, we're not even dealing with particularly
> significant amounts of money in the first place here -- why not focus on
> bigger, less contentious sources of cost savings?
>
> I am curious about why ASA specifically has such massive food expenses,
> though -- I'm not involved enough with it personally to know the answer to
> this, but I would like to. Also, if we can't hand off PLUS by next year, I
> would like to see its allocations significantly reduced as I said earlier --
> it is way too expensive for the number of people participating in it, and I
> feel that doing so would be a good example of conceivably significant
> benefit to student groups without serious detriment to services rendered to
> the student body as a whole by the UA.
>
> As the above would imply, I'm not opposed to increasing student group
> allocations when it can be done without causing issues for the UA or forcing
> us to cut back on things that benefit everyone, but I am opposed to doing so
> when such effects occur as a result. I am also opposed to any attempts to
> do so unilaterally -- that is, without the full and well-informed support of
> Senate. You asked for guidance. I had already mentioned a number of these
> things in previous messages, but since you seem to be implying that I must
> not care if I do not restate myself, I have done so.
>
> Ted
>
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Alex Dehnert (UA Treasurer) <
> ua-treasurer@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> I guess nobody cares that much? I don't need guidance, but I think Senate
>> giving me guidance soon would be really productive (and would make the
>> budgeting meetings less painful). Unfortunately, committee chairs have
>> already started giving me budgets (and the budget deadline was supposed to
>> be last night and is now Saturday night), so we're already towards the end
>> of the useful interval, but some discussion, consensus-building, and maybe
>> even a resolution on Monday would still be useful.
>>
>>
>> ~~Alex
>>
>> Alex Dehnert (UA Treasurer) wrote:
>>
>>> Hi again,
>>>
>>> I wanted to follow up on this thread. Spring budgeting will be starting
>>> up shortly --- committee chairs just received the budget request, and then
>>> I'll assemble a budget in the next week or two.
>>>
>>> A brief (and rather incomplete) summary of the thread so far:
>>> * SBC: Contact Paul (ua-speaker@mit.edu) (and, ideally, me ---
>>> ua-treasurer@mit.edu) if you'd like to be especially involved in the
>>> spring budget
>>> * PLUS was something the UA could get started and then hand off
>>> * Focus on student groups: "there is a natural, institutional bias toward
>>> spending the money ourselves" that should be counteracted
>>> * On the other hand, do special projects like the produce market
>>> benefit more people than a BBQ on Kresge or something does?
>>> * Move fall budgeting back to the spring?
>>> * Move elections to the spring?
>>> * Food
>>> * Collection jar for Senate food?
>>> * 14% of budget?
>>> * Necessary incentive for committees?
>>> * (Some?) class councils don't do it
>>> * A lot of variety on how much committees request --- look at spending
>>> this semester and standardize?
>>> * Class councils... exist. (Read that thread if you want more...)
>>>
>>> I have semi-intentionally didn't include names in the above --- if you
>>> want more details, I encourage you to find the original messages --- as
>>> a bonus, you may see tidbits that your didn't remember.
>>>
>>> Anyway... if any of those discussions are worth continuing, feel free. I
>>> encourage you to change the subject line to reflect the subtopic you're
>>> addressing, though.
>>>
>>> If Senate wishes to provide me with direction, please due so at the next
>>> (Nov 2) meeting, or at the latest the Nov 9 meeting. After that, it becomes
>>> harder for me to make major changes while still being able to provide a
>>> quality, well-reviewed budget to Senate well in advance of the Nov 30
>>> non-voting budget meeting.
>>>
>>> ~~Alex
>>>
>>> Alex Dehnert (UA Treasurer) wrote:
>>>
>>>> A few of you have emailed me off-list. While that's great, I'm much more
>>>> likely to take action if a consensus seems to be emerging on the list or a
>>>> bill/resolution gets passed. When all I get are private emails, I can't as
>>>> easily tell the difference between people being mostly one way because the
>>>> other side is apathetic (and doesn't realize that their side is "losing"),
>>>> or because Senate genuinely prefers that way.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Alex
>>>>
>>>> Alex Dehnert (UA Treasurer) wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> As several people have pointed out, the UA spends quite a bit of money
>>>>> on events (about a third of last semester's budget) and focused projects
>>>>> (like PLUS --- about a tenth of last semester's UA budget). As Andrew
>>>>> Lukmann pointed out last week, committees are spending almost
>>>>> twice as much
>>>>> in Fall 2009's budget as in Spring 2007's budget.
>>>>>
>>>>> Unfortunately, it is now a little bit late to make major changes to the
>>>>> Fall 2009 budget. Last week's meeting was intended to allow that, and we
>>>>> spent a great deal of time on it then. I also solicited feedback
>>>>> late Friday
>>>>> night (or really Saturday morning), and didn't receive any. Of
>>>>> course, you
>>>>> are well within your rights to amend the budget at this point. (Though
>>>>> Athletics Weekend has already happened, so I'd rather you didn't amend
>>>>> that...)
>>>>>
>>>>> However, the Spring 2010 budget has not begun being compiled. In
>>>>> preparing the the Fall 2009 budget, I (and I believe committee chairs and
>>>>> the Special Budgetary Committee) generally followed precedent as
>>>>> to events
>>>>> and amounts.
>>>>>
>>>>> In some sense, there are (at least) two options for guiding principles
>>>>> to take in producing the budget:
>>>>> (1) Many of the UA-run events are more useful than the events and
>>>>> programming (Finboard-funded) student groups would spend the money on
>>>>> (2) Alternatively, that events and programs such as Athletics Weekend or
>>>>> PLUS aren't worth taking the money away from those student groups
>>>>>
>>>>> We've recently been defaulting to the former guiding principle. However,
>>>>> I would encourage the Senate to seriously consider which is
>>>>> preferable and
>>>>> pass appropriate legislation indicating a preference.
>>>>>
>>>>> I would be *thrilled* to have such guidance, and would happily
>>>>> incorporate it into next semester's budget. (I warn you, however, that
>>>>> committee chairs will probably be asked to begin budgeting in about two
>>>>> weeks.)
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>> Alex Dehnert
>>>>> UA Treasurer
>>>>>
>>>>
>
