Senate Blows $835,784 In Overrealized Spending Orgy
What’s the second-worst thing about 7 hour long Senate meetings? The bars are closed by the time you get done.
What’s the worst thing about 7 hour long Senate meetings? The fact that Senate is “working” the whole time.
Last night, the Senate spent $835,784 of misappropriated money in about 7 hours. That’s about $120,000 per hour, and about $2,000 per minute. Oh yes, and they were making up the process as they went along.
Quite the accomplishment.
The meeting began on a happy note, when senators learned that the Overrealized Fund had swollen from around $800,000 to $965,503, giving them even more of this “shadow tax” slush fund to throw at their pet projects. After last Sunday’s appropriations committee meeting, in which the allocation process outlined in Senate Bill 23 was officially abandoned/ignored, Senators have felt comfortable with proceeding to spend this ridiculous sum without any official process at all. Somehow they muddled through.
The Procedure
Step 1: Allow all 19 proposals to present their cases for two minutes each (more than enough time to explain a $100,000+ project).
Step 2: Discussion on each of the 19 proposals. (“Like, even though this saves students money, we can’t support it and still be fiscally responsible”)
Step 3: Let the reality sink in that you are about to spend almost a million dollars of misappropriated money, and yet you don’t have any clue how to do it fairly. Frantically discuss how this is going to work. Do we open the agenda? Do we just vote off the proposals we don’t like? Do we open the bidding for kickbacks?
Step 4: Decide to open the agenda, and vote proposals on. Spend hours eliminating a handful of proposals.
Step 5: Vote on funding each proposal. If it fails, try again at a different amount. Move down the list in order of descending costs.
Step 6: Congratulations! You just spent almost a million dollars. Pat yourself on the back, and then collapse on the floor from the exhaustion of participating in 7 hours of drunken-sailor spending, procedural flailing and political patronage.
The Allocations
The EMU Multicultural Wing Expansion- $300,000. In what can only be described as a fairly shocking display, several Senators went on the record as saying that the Multicultural Wing Expansion should receive $800,000, leaving only $135,000 for the remaining million dollars plus worth of proposals. Luckily, the Constitutional Court has limited conflict of interest to only one specific example, because those Senators were all members and co-directors of at least one of the groups who would have gotten new offices/facilities out of the deal. The rest of Senate was appropriately appalled that one proposal would even consider requesting nearly all of the money, and showed its disapproval by funding the proposal to the tune of $300,000, which was over $100,000 more than the next biggest proposal.
Biodiesel Vans- $174,000. This was passed originally for two new biodiesel vans, but was amended at the end of the night to buy the three vans that campus recycling originally requested. It saves (some) money, and the eco-idealists love it, so it never faced much of a challenge.
Rec Center Deficit Solution- $118,705. This proposal was deadlocked, before Vice-President Guzman cast her tie-breaking vote to approve the deficit relief funding. It was immensely important that Senate approve this measure in order to protect an expensive investment of student dollars, and help the Rec Center to overcome its historically inadequate funding levels. However, this re-investment by students needs to be matched by the PARS staff, who throughout this year have not offered a single solution to their problems besides more student dollars. Now that students have stepped up to the plate, PARS needs to live up to its promise to maintain a sustainable budget, or it needs to find new leadership who can.
Miller Theater Expansion- $100,000. Theater kids are so excitable. You should have seen the looks on their adorably nerdy faces when their expansion project funding was approved. Too bad Das Frohn will probably veto it (see future blog post).
EMU Equipment Upgrade- $100,000. No real debate. Just spend the damn money.
Latin American Philosophy Seminar- $20,000. Politically very popular, but sources indicate that it might fall off at one of the two veto points (Axelrod, Frohnmayer).
Club Sports Office Expansion- $10,579. Club Sports is one of the few fee-funded programs that requires dues from its members. They wanted some furniture for their new office, and they got it. Good for them.
Campus Biodiesel Initiative- $12,500. Relatively cheap proposal to bring a biodiesel infrastructure to campus. Saves money, good for the image, a no-brainer (given that not spending the money wasn’t an option.)
I’ll leave it at that. There’s more to say about what happened with the Overrealized Fund this year, but most of it’s just depressing. One can only hope that this interlude was embarrassing enough for someone in the ASUO to take the idea of mitigating overrealized accumulation seriously. It would be incredibly easy to do, it would reduce an unnecessary part of the I-Fee burden, and it would prevent willy-nilly, spend-because-we-can moments such as this.
