Editor’s Note: it was incorrectly stated that Finance Board allocated money to Student Lobby. It was allocated to the state affairs organizing director. The Daily Nexus regrets this error.
The Associated Students Finance Board meeting Monday was a busy one, leaving the board with only $2,405.25 left to dole out to student groups for the rest of the quarter.
The board began Spring Quarter with a budget of $29,534.74 and spent over one-third of that at its first meeting last week. At Monday’s meeting, the board faced a challenge as 13 different campus organizations presented funding requests totaling over $22,000.
Finance Board Chair Fernando Ramirez said the meeting, which lasted nearly three and a half hours, was the board’s longest so far this year.
“I think we were as productive as possible at the meeting,” Ramirez said. “You can never tell in advance how many groups are going to show up.”
Of the 13 organizations that attended the meeting, A.S. Student Lobby received the most funding. The group was given $2,625 to cover registration fees for the 35 people the group will be sending to the University of California Student Association Lobby Conference in Sacramento.
Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity’s 13th annual Fight Night drew around 3,500 spectators last year – making it the second largest event held on campus, after graduation. Event organizers were granted $1,600 to pay for use of the Thunderdome, since all profits from the event will be donated to charity.
The board voted 6-5 to set aside $1,000 for each of Spring Quarter’s five culture weeks. After board members raised objections that the limit would be unfair to groups that had already submitted funding requests, the board voted to waive the $1,000 limit for groups present at Monday’s meeting.
Ramirez said he thought the decision to fix the amount of money given to the culture weeks was a sound one, considering the board’s tight budget.
“Seeing as how many groups there were, I think it was the most effective thing to do,” Ramirez said.
The A.S. Queer Commission and the Asian Pacific Islander Culture Week Committee were present at the meeting and benefited from the decision to waive the $1,000 limit. ASQC received $1,635 for Queer Pride Week, an annual event that is going to be hosted by four different campus queer organizations.
Asian Pacific Islander Month, an event organizers said was originally going last one week but has been expanded to include the entire month of May, received $1,300 to help pay for its keynote speaker, a professor from the University of Delaware.
Board member and representative-at-large Kristen Ditlevsen said she was unhappy that the board waited so long to fix the amount of money given to the culture weeks. She said she also thought that the way Finance Board has been allocating its budget is not consistent with the board’s set of guidelines for determining which groups and events should be given priority.
“I’m frequently frustrated with the lack of consistency in the way the board votes,” Ditlevsen said. “We’ve allocated far more money to individual events than we are giving to the culture weeks.”
The other groups receiving funding at the meeting were Rock in I.V., which received $1,000; Iaorana Te Otea Polynesian Dance Club, which received $650; UCSB Hillel’s I.V. Unplugged, which received $607; Raices de mi Tierra, which received $550; Reel Loud Film Festival, which received $415; Chi Delta Theta’s Unity Games, which received $280; and the Filipino Graduation Ceremony, which received $100.