[89] in UA Senate
Re: UA budgeting principles
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex Schwendner)
Wed Oct 14 20:46:03 2009
In-Reply-To: <4AD5591C.4020402@mit.edu>
From: Alex Schwendner <alexrs@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:45:34 -0400
To: "Alex Dehnert (UA Treasurer)" <ua-treasurer@mit.edu>
Cc: ua-senate@mit.edu, ua-discuss@mit.edu
I would like to advocate that our budgeting goal should be to allocate
more money to student groups. Here's why:
Our goal, as the Undergraduate Association, is to make things better
for undergraduates. When it comes to money, this means that we should
see that money gets spent on the things which most benefit MIT
undergraduates. This might mean that we spend the money ourselves or
this might mean that we give it to student groups who can use it.
There are plenty of student groups who do wonderful and amazing
things. All of us can think of student groups which get much of their
funding from the UA which have made our time at MIT more worthwhile.
Our goal, as the UA, should not be to do awesome things, but rather to
see that awesome things get done.
Sometimes, of course, this will mean that we should spend money on
projects conceived by the UA and sometimes this will mean that we
should give money to student groups. However, there is a natural,
institutional bias toward spending the money ourselves. We need to
fight that bias. Since we, the UA, get first crack at the money, it's
easy to think of cool things which we can do with the money while
forgetting about the very real and very cool things which student
groups will *not* be able to do without that money. We can see this
"mission creep" in UA funding in the way that the money allocated to
UA committees has increased in past years. Yes, the UA does more with
the increased money, but it is not always clear that it's spent better
than it could be spent by student groups. The standards which hold for
receiving funding from the UA general budget should be analogous to
the standards which hold for receiving funding from UA Finboard. I
will note that while UA committees received basically everything that
they asked for in the Fall UA budget, student groups which applied to
UA Finboard received less than 30% of their requests in the most
recent funding cycle.
Therefore, during the Spring 2010 budgeting process, I intend to push
for allocating more money for student groups. Projects which we choose
not to fund from the UA general budget can seek funding through UA
Finboard, from LEF or ARCADE, from the MIT Administration, or from
other funding sources.
Please discuss.
Alex Schwendner
On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:52 AM, Alex Dehnert (UA Treasurer)
<ua-treasurer@mit.edu> 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
>
