The first few Special Fee petitions are up, and they’re requesting huge increases over their requests from last year, which were smaller than normal because of Undergraduate Senate policies. KZSU is asking for $81,338, a 25% increase from 2010 (but only slightly higher than their $78,974 request from 2009), and Club Sports is asking for $185,622.40, a 22% increase (but a decrease relative to their $200,449 request from 2009).
The most interesting, though, is Alternative Spring Break (ASB), which is asking for $80,358. At first glance, this is a massive 257% increase over last year’s request (which was small because they tapped their reserves), but compared to ASB’s 2009 request of $58,982, this year’s request represents a “mere” 16.7% annualized increase. Last year, ASB had the most “yes” votes of any Special Fee group (84.3% of all undergrads), so they’re hoping that their margin of safety is large enough to withstand the “no” votes from uninformed students who balk at the increase.
Of course, it’s natural to expect that petitioning groups will have large increases. If the increase is less than 11.5%, then no petition is needed.
Update: I had initially cited ASB’s 257% increase before I was aware that this was an anomaly caused by their unusually small 2010 request. Minh Dan Vuong, former ASB Financial Officer, called me, and I’ve since updated the post to include the explanation. As last year’s Elections Commissioner, I should have remembered this but didn’t. Sorry! Update2: Same goes for the other two groups. Updated post to reflect that.
