At its weekly meeting yesterday night, Student Council passed its 2010-11 budget proposal, but not before striking a line that would have allocated $2,000 toward a Council iPhone app.
The budget - which was drafted by Council Chief Financial Officer Alan Rogers and Vice President for Administration Jen Bristol - includes $62,863 in Student Activities Funds and $13,628 in non-SAF funds, for a total of $76,461 overall, down slightly from last year's total budget of $83,698 and significantly lower than the $116,000 2008-09 budget. It also includes a 28 percent decrease in the amount of non-SAF funds, from $18,962 last year to $13,628 this year.
Bristol noted that there are additions to this year's budget, though, including a $1,000 reserve fund, which is required according to Council bylaws and will be used if any emergency expense arises.
The budget also contains a $5,000 contingency fund to support cosponsorship opportunities for its committees.
"New for this year, the executive board was able to put together a cosponsorship program," Bristol said. "We put aside money in non-SAF for this new program. If committees feel they cannot fund projects with the money they do have in their budget, we're hoping they could apply to the executive board and use this discretionary fund. It would apply to the executive board, and the executive board would allocate that money accordingly."
Before they voted on the bill, several Council representatives had some reservations about specific items in the operations budget.
Arts & Sciences Graduate representative Dave Hondula questioned whether it would be necessary to allocate the $2,000 to a Council iPhone app, which Engineering representative Seth Kaye said would probably be an RSS meter that downloads new Council blogs posts from the website and delivers them along with notifications to the iPhone user.
Council President Colin Hood said the student who helped create the "The Official Virginia iPhone app" is currently on Council's technology team and was willing to support the creation of an app for Council, but doubts remained about whether Council should support such an investment.
"I think it's great and cool, but is it a wise use of student funds?" Hondula asked. "I'm not totally convinced that this is a worthwhile investment."
Moreover, Hondula said Council is already making effective use of free or relatively inexpensive outlets of advertising.
"We're doing a great job with free services, or close to free services, that two years ago didn't exist at all," Hondula said.
College representative Charlie Miller suggested that a feature could be added to the current app but noted that not every student has an iPhone, so not every student would benefit from the $2,000 investment.
Kaye also had reservations about using student funds for the app.
"The current app [for the University] was mostly funded by athletics and the Alumni Association," Kaye said before commenting about how the proposed allocation might not be necessary for asimple RSS app. "It's very simple to do - [I] don't think that needs to cost $2,000."
Representative body Chair Ben Wallace, however, noted that the app did not necessarily need to cost the full $2,000 allocated to it.
"We don't have to spend all the money appropriated to every line item," Wallace said. "It's designed to give us the flexibility to go up to that amount, but chances are good that we won't actually go up to that amount."
Regarding other controversial spending items, Hondula questioned the $1,500 spent on Student Council T-shirts. This amount represents nearly 2 percent of Council's total budget.
"That's a pretty large portion of our SAF money," Hondula said. "I know it's not the exact same pot of money, but we're going to have student groups coming in here who are hanging by a thread to exist, and they're selling T-shirts to raise money for their groups, and we're spending money they're giving us to give ourselves shirts - at least that's one way of perceiving it."
In response, Hood said T-shirts have typically been in the budget during the last couple years and that they promote Council and encourage dialogue among students about student government.
Furthermore, Bristol said T-shirts are useful for differentiating who is a member of Council during staffing events, which helps facilitate logistics and overall organization.
Now that the budget has been passed by Council's representative body, members of Council's executive board will meet with the Student Activities Committee today to receive final approval for the budget. Once approved, the budget will allow Council's committees to start on their projects for the year.
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