Last semester, campus organizations over-requested funds for the Student Government Association budget allocations, resulting in a 47 percent drop in funding from fall 2010.
This semester, the SGA Budget Allocation Committee expects to amend the process through a three-bracket system and SGA’s judicial branch, which will aid in sufficient allocations.
“The allocation process is the process by which organizations apply for and are granted part of the SGA budget for the current semester,” said Brian Gibbons, finance senior and SGA’s director of finance.
“Traditionally, $75,000 is made available during the allocation process with $10,000 more made available during post allocations.”
Gibbons also said that this semester, the overall amount is expected to increase and will be made available during or before President’s Council, where the process of budget allocations is explained to representatives of all clubs and organizations.
Too many funding requests from organizations caused budget problems for allocations and resulted in cuts that short-sided full funding, Gibbons said.
“At the time, more information on the allocation process was being released than had ever been present before,” he said. “This allowed organizations to strategically apply for funding in a flawed process whereby it was in the interest of each organization to maximize its requests in order to maximize the results.”
In order to correct this problem, a three-bracket system will break up organizations into three percentage range categories based on how much funding is requested, he said.
“A new system has been put in place (where) instead of each organization applying against one another for a chunk of the overall sum of money, organizations will now be classified into brackets based on what percentage of the overall funding that they choose to request,” he said.
The three-bracket system will allocate funds in the following ways; organizations seeking less than or equal to 1.5 percent of the funds will go in Bracket 1, Bracket 2 will be between 1.5001 percent to 3.5 percent of funds, and Bracket 3 will give funds to organizations requesting more than 3.5 percent of allocated funds, Gibbons said.
SGA is working on incorporating the judicial branch into the allocation process to help monitor funding and organization motives, he said.
“Justices would act as an enforcing body that backs the restrictions within the process and reviews how organizations spend their allocated funds to ensure a legitimate use of student fees,” Gibbons said. “This process is still in the works and will be ready for presentation during President’s Council.”
Organizations must also have up-to-date records with the Office of Co-Curricular Programs, otherwise they will not be eligible to receive funding from allocations. As of Sept. 1 at noon, Co-Curricular’s records indicate that only 42 of the 76 registered organizations at Loyola have completely filed these documents in their entirety.
The President’s Council will be held Sept. 15.
The SGA Budget Allocation Request Form is the document that SGA will review to decide how to allocate funding to the various organizations. The deadline to submit the form is Sept. 30 at 6:00 p.m.
Kamaria Monmouth can be reached at [email protected]
