News
ASSU May Rethink Special Fees
by Ryan J. Wisnesky
News Staff

The ASSU Undergraduate Senate has developed four new alternative Special Fee systems in light of increases recently voted by the student body in Special Fees to be doled out to student groups.

As the number of Special Fees groups continues to rise -- there were 61 on the ballot this year -- the amount each student must pay rises correspondingly. Next year's undergraduates can expect to pay the ASSU over $200 in special fees. Moreover, as the charges increase, more students will request refunds, forcing the ASSU to raise fees even higher.

The Undergraduate Senate knows that this trend cannot continue for much longer. This year there has been particular attention paid to skyrocketing Special Fees costs. There have been a number of proposals, including blocking more groups from appearing on the ballot, increasing the Community Service Fund so that some organizations can use money from that fund rather than Special Fees, allowing students to allocate a certain number of funds to different groups rather than just voting, and keeping a running total of next year's Special Fees during the voting process so that students can make more informed decisions.

Over the past several years the Undergraduate Senate has not actively blocked groups from the ballot. Although the Senate Appropriations Committee meets with every Special Fee group to review its budget and ensure that realistic and accurate fees are requested, essentially all of the groups are placed on the ballot.

This year's Appropriations Co-Chair Josh Shipp is keenly aware of the problem. "We definitely discussed this issue this year when Senators saw all the groups who were applying for either the first time, arguably benefited too few students to warrant special fees, or didn't really need student funding to operate. However, in the end, we felt that the Special Fees process was a process for students to ultimately decide for themselves which groups deserve their money," he noted. However, in future years, this process might change. Given that virtually all Special Fee groups placed on that ballot are granted Special Fees -- only four groups this year were denied funding -- some type of filtering process is almost certain to be implemented.

"I think the Senate will realistically have to start being more strict when approving groups for placement on the ballot," said Mr. Shipp. "The fee is just growing too large. That said, it will be a very difficult thing to determine the criteria by which to accept some groups and reject others. It should be a process that all Special Fees groups have feedback in - since it will ultimately affect them the most."

A group can bypass the requirement of ASSU approval and earn direct placement on the ballot by collecting signatures from 15% of its intended constituency --the undergraduate population, the graduate student body, or both. Because groups placed on the ballot in this way do not meet with the Senate Appropriations Committee, there is no oversight on the amount of funding that can be requested, potentially giving groups the ability to abuse their funding.

Another proposal to reduce the upcoming year's Special Fees involves increasing the Community Service Fund from $6000 to $8000. These funds are part of the General Fee budget and are controlled by the Senate. This proposal would reduce the Special Fees paid by students, but the groups would still get some funding. However, students would still be indirectly funding the groups, and students would not have explicit say in the disbursement of funds.

The third proposal is to allocate a specific number of funds per student. In this scheme, a student would be allotted a certain dollar quantity, say $100. Then as the student selected Special Fee groups for approval, money would be deducted from the original $100. A student would not be allowed to vote for any combination of groups exceeding $100. After voting, either the groups with the most votes would be fully funded, or each group would receive the amount of funds voted to it. However, because students might select radically different groups and because not every student votes, the former option is more probable, as otherwise no groups might be fully funded.

The fourth proposal is very similar to the third. In this proposal, rather than fixing an upper limit on the amount of funds a student can allocate, the voting software would tell the students what next year's fee would be should each group pass. "We'd like to implement. . . . a real-time running total of the fee for the next year based on that student's votes," says Shipp. "In the event they went over some upper amount set by the Legislative Bodies it would warn them ÔIf all of these groups pass the fee is going to be $120/quarter'". Shipp is excited about this particular proposal: "Hopefully that will help students understand the relation between their votes and the following year's ASSU Fee."

Under the current Special Fee system, each student is charged approximately 7% more than is strictly required to meet the Special Fees budget. However, students are free to request a full or partial Special Fee refund; the overcharge is necessary to fund the groups fully after those students requesting fee refunds have withdrawn their money. There is no system to accord only partial funding to a group. "For the past few years we've been pretty dead-on as far as making accurate predictions (erring on the side of undercharging students) as far as how many students will request refunds and so we've been slowly whittling the Special Buffer fund down in not surcharging as much as we need to cover all refunds," notes Shipp. There are no serious efforts underway to change the way refunds are handled.

Student reaction to high Special Fee costs has been mixed. Kea Gilbert, a sophomore who voted and did not request a refund, had the following to say: "I think that it's an awesome way to allow the students to have a say in the options that are available to them and in the type of organizations they want to emphasize and use to characterize their community. On the other hand, although I have no solid proof of this, it seems like students will automatically vote for cooler or more showy organizations, even if they have no more value or substance than another equally valid group."

"So in that way, it ends up being a little bit of a popularity contest where groups who have friends that vote tend to be reelected to special fees." But she captured a campus wide sentiment: "I sort of think that many students need to vote in order for it to be technically fair."

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:23:33 MST.