The UC Santa Barbara Associated Students final budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year shows that 35% of their entities ended the year with rollover funding, leaving $3,371,913.71 unused.

Rollover is a sum of money a group gains in one fiscal year intended for use in the next fiscal year. At UCSB, when one of the Boards, Committees and Units (BCUs) gains income, they have an option to put remaining funds that haven’t been used yet into rollover for the next year. This is recorded in the Associated Students’ (A.S.) budget, which is overseen by the Finance and Business Committee as well as the A.S. President.

UCSB alum David Jr Sim, who majored in computer science and psychological & brain sciences, was the A.S. Chief Compliance Officer for the 2024-25 school year. In this role, Sim dealt with “internal compliance” for A.S. and the finance committee to make sure all legal procedures were followed. Sim explained how campus organizations get rollover funds and how they can keep it.

“[If a BCU gets] 80,000 and they only spend 40,000, that extra 40,000 at the end of the year is their quote, unquote rollover,” Sim said. “There are two options, two directions that that money can go. One is, if the entity applies for rollover … [and if the senate approves] of that rollover, the entity will get to keep that money for the next year … but if that rollover is denied, or if the committee doesn’t request the rollover, then it goes back into the big, quote, unquote, undesignated pool that can be redistributed.”

The majority of the A.S. budget comes from student fees. There are two types of funding that A.S. has: the lock-in and the undesignated.

“The lock-in is the portion of [students’] tuition that goes into the association,” Sim said. “[It] is a fee that is voted on and approved by the student body as a whole for specific purposes and services.”

These services’ funding cannot be changed unless voted on in the A.S. spring quarter elections by the student body. “[Some lock-in fees] that come to mind … are the Isla Vista Tenants Union and the Isla Vista Community Relations Committee,” Sim said.

This is the amount of funding received by lock-in fees for the 2024-25 fiscal year. The data comes from the final 2024-25 A.S. budget. The five entities that gained the most money in student fees exceeded the average amount of funding received by an entity, which is $236,181.56. (Malia Guy / Daily Nexus)

This puts the previous graph’s data into percentage forms. The top five entities, in terms of dollar amount received in funding, account for almost 50% of the lock-in funding received, reaching 49.4%. The bottom five entities, in terms of amount received for funding, make up for only 2.8% of the funding received. (Malia Guy / Daily Nexus)

The undesignated funding is what the A.S. Finance and Business Committee, A.S. President and A.S. Senate have control over. They can determine which BCUs get what amount of money.

“You would start off with an organization,” Sim said, “then you would go ahead and create a flux account. Flux is the grant management software that we use in our association. You link that to your organization, and then you would just submit a request.”

As seen in the budget, some of the money a group uses is not specifically for events; sometimes it can just be for operating. But the priority of funding, according to Sim, is for entities that have shown the need for it.

“The committee will deliberate on your events, making sure that it follows our financial policies and that it is a good use of student fees, after which we decide whether it’s a yes or no [for funding],” Sim said.

Entities that already have lock-in fees will sometimes request more funding. The request  is written in the budget as additional funding, but is not always approved.

“There’s no one person that has the final call,” Sim said. “The committee will decide on a majority vote … [they have] the final say, 50% of the committee plus one for quorum.”

Undergraduate students paid $1,977.75 in A.S. fees for 2024-2025, not including summer. Still, even with all the funding from students, not every entity can receive a sum. 

“We, as UCSB Associated Students, get one of the biggest budgets in net sum across any UC, but we also have the biggest amount of entities,” Sim said. “In the previous year I would say 90-99% of requests were never fully fulfilled. We just don’t have enough.”

Second year economics and accounting major Urmi Mandal is the current co-chair of the Human Rights Board and spoke of the board’s experience with funding. According to Mandal, the Human Rights Board was one of the groups that had unfulfilled requests for the 2024-25 school year. The Human Rights Boards does not have A.S. designated lock-in fees and instead has to request for funding.

“We requested 69,500 [dollars], and what we finally ended up receiving was 51,500 [dollars],” Mandal said. “We had to remove some events we had because payments from A.S. admin might not have come in time.”

It takes time for campus groups to get reimbursed because they need to send a formal requisition. Mandal spoke on how the Human Rights Board has been impacted by the process. 

“[A.S. admin requires] our board members to pay out of pocket to get reimbursed, which is not the preferred way of going about funding events,” Mandal said. “Putting on events sometimes includes booking a room or catering food or providing snacks, and that adds up.”

This brings up a complication with rollover funds. Rollover funds go back to the group the money is coming from, not really addressing the other entities that might have a need for it, according to Sim.

“[If] it is a lock-in, [their rollover] can’t just go back into the undesignated pool of money to be used for whatever,” Sim said. “It has to be used for the purpose that the student body voted on. In the association, there are a few specific lock-in BCUs that get automatic rollover, and that’s just to streamline the process.”

This chart displays each entity that had their budget in the 2024-25 budget sheet. It shows which entities had rollover and what amount it was. For this fiscal year, 45 out of 97 entities had rollover funds from the previous year. Two groups were displayed as negative rollover funds (The Bottom Line and the Bike Shop Trust Fund) without clear explanation of why. (Malia Guy / Daily Nexus)

This graph showcases the groups that have rollover funds this year. An entity can have rollover if they wrote directly in their budget that they would have rollover or if they were a lock-in group that wanted to keep the funding they didn’t use. Out of 97 groups, 34 still reported having funds left over from this year, amounting to $3,371,913.71. (Malia Guy / Daily Nexus)

“The current situation is unstable. Every group has gotten … some kind of funding cut for next year,” Sim said. “Ever since I’ve been in the association, the finances [and] the income [have] not grown to reflect the growth of our expenses, and in the long term, that means using up all of our reserves, using up all of our investment profits and basically going bankrupt.”

Elaborating, Sim explained what would help circumvent that case would be to “reduce our expenditures” and try to “grow our reserves.”

“Our Associate Director of Finance and Budget is making a push to restructure the way we think about our budgets,” Sim said. “A lot of the requests that we get during the budget cycle [are], I would say, very idealistic. And we want them to be idealistic. We want to be able to fulfill that ideal … but it’s also a need for a push to be reflective.”

When giving funding to some entities, Sim said, “A lot of the times we see that historically, entities request, let’s say $80,000 will never spend $80,000 they will only spend 40,000 or 50,000. That’s $30,000 that they’re locking up for the entire year that could go to another BCU or another entity.”