By Susannah Waite, Editor-in-Chief
Student Senate has spent nearly a third of the allocation money for the semester after three meetings.
Senate started the semester with about $30,000, according to the Student Government Association spring budget.
“We started out with rollover of about $2,000 from the previous semester, and at the Jan. 22 meeting, we passed the spring budget,” said David Bishop, finance sophomore and appropriations committee chairman.
Student Senate had about $19,000 left in rolling appropriations after the Jan. 29 meeting.
“We’ve passed about five to eight bills this semester,” Bishop said. “We are going to be more vigilant when looking at bills.”
The Jan. 29 meeting was after State of the Students and that caused some problems, he said.
“We had to amend bills on the floor instead of within the committee before meeting,” Bishop said.
The committee is re-evaluating how much they will fund organizations.
“We’ll be looking at creating a criteria for bills,” Bishop said. “It’ll just be an internal thing, understood among all the senators, especially when writing bills.
“This also helps the senators communicate with organizations on what they can and can’t ask for.”
The amount of fundraising organizations do also will be important, Bishop said.
“It’s really frustrating for us,” he said. “We want organizations to think of ways to fundraise instead of relying on us to fund their trips.”
The appropriations committee also plans to look at bills passed in the past four to five years.
“We want to see what people have asked for and we have funded in the past,” Bishop said.
With the criteria Bishop said he hopes organizations with proposed bills on the floor will not request as much funding.
“We won’t have that much money on the floor, so we’re not just bleeding money,” he said. “This is something that everyone on the floor will be aware of.”
Alex Johnson, entertainment business sophomore, said Senate should be more careful with how much they allocate.
“I don’t like the fact that they’ve used that much money already,” Johnson said. “There are definitely a lot of organizations that need money.”
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