I had a little chat with ASUO Executive Sam Dotters-Katz yesterday, and he filled me in on some of the ASUO summer happenings.

• The UO administration denied the BWA and CALC over-realized requests that the ASUO Senate previously approved. If you were looking forward to that $64,000 hair show, you’ll just have to wait for some other time. The money will be rolled back into the over-realized fund. Dotters-Katz said there are ways to greatly benefit the student body without spending exorbitant amounts of money, citing a plan he is working on with the VFSA to install a satellite communications system that would allow family and friends to communicate with troops stationed overseas. The system would cost only $5,000.
• Over the summer, Dotters-Katz trimmed roughly $50,000 from the incidental fee budget by firing the campus OSA coordinator and changing the Holden Leadership Center to a non-EMU program.
• Most promising, Dotters-Katz said he plans to use the burgeoning over-realized fund to defray i-fee costs to students. The over-realized fund is already up to about $200,000 and is projected to reach almost two million dollars. “It’s my goal to use 75 percent of the over-realized fund to buy down the incidental fee by $1,250,000 if the fee is under or at $1.5 million,” he said. Dotters-Katz said he would have more concrete plans once “we have a better idea of what the number is going to look like.”

All in all, great work from Dotters-Katz and crew. Buying down the I-fee would be a huge step forward in fiscal responsibility. I hope they keep up this precedent throughout the coming school year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 18:22 by CJ Ciaramella and is filed under ASUO, Blowing Stuff Up, Campus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.