Funding debate sparks reform

The Northern Iowa Student Government senate denied funding for University of Northern Iowa Colleges Against Cancer Wednesday over a question of precedent and interpretation, a decision that helped spark a revision of the student government's funding guidelines.

The funding bill, which would have allocated $1,950 to Colleges Against Cancer for a hypnotist and photo booth for its Relay For Life event, failed on a vote of 7-16-2.

    The final decision resulted from much debate on the interpretation of NISG's funding guidelines, which state that organizations that have received funding for an item through the budgeting process cannot receive additional funding from the Panther and Contingency Funds for the same item. While some senators thought the word "item" should be taken to refer to a line item in the budget — like a karaoke machine, for example — others argued there was a precedent of interpreting the word more broadly to refer to an event.

    The Organization and Finance Committee previously denied the request based on the precedent, which was passed on through word of mouth from previous committee members, in order to treat all organizations equitably.

    "We denied it based on that fact, that we wanted to be fair to all organizations who would have been in a similar situation," said KaLeigh White, an at-large senator on the Organization and Finance Committee.

    Ryan Alfred, speaker of the senate, wanted to give the senate a chance to discuss the interpretation of the guidelines, and so he brought the funding bill to the senate with senators Nate Konrardy and Blake Findley as cosponsors.

    "I really was looking for that interpretation of what ‘item' meant, and I don't think that really has ever been discussed with student government, so I wanted to see what that would actually turn out to be and see if senate would have their own opinion about that," Alfred said.

    The debate also highlighted the fact that UNI Colleges Against Cancer and UNI Relay For Life, two separate student organizations with their own constitutions, have the same executive board, causing some senators to question whether the same students were trying to use two organizations to get extra funding.

"From my understanding, though, Relay for Life had no intention of that," White said.She believes these similar organizations should be able to exist and that it would be up to the Organization and Finance Committee to determine whether to allocate funding if an organization tried to create and use a second organization to get extra funding.

    The Relay For Life discussion, coupled with a similar debate over funding buttons for the Black Student Union two weeks ago, surfaced tensions between precedents set by previous senators and the interpretations and understanding of the current senate that have resulted from the ambiguous funding guidelines.  The senate is now looking to overhaul the guidelines through a series of discussions, the first of which occurred Monday night, in order to make them more explicit and accessible to students.

    Alfred hopes NISG will make changes to the guidelines to make it easier for organizations to get funding.

    "It's not fair for students from UNI to pay student service fees and that money will just sit there and not be spent until four years down the road," he said. "… If we're going to continue to take their money, we need to find a better way to fund, and I think a lot of people see that as senators."

    "I understand where they're coming from," said Kaleigh Green, a member of Colleges Against Cancer who served as Senator Patrick Gibbs' proxy during part of the discussion. "They have to follow precedent; there are rules for a reason — it's just an unfortunate circumstance that we have to be put in it. However, if Colleges Against Cancer has to be the organization that will make it better for the whole UNI campus, we're willing to do that."

    Colleges Against Cancer's situation also highlighted the difficulty of planning next year's budget in February.

    "It's just hard to plan the budgetary process right now," said Amanda Robertson, co-vice president of Colleges Against Cancer. "I mean, it's due in two weeks, and we haven't even started to plan next year's Relay yet, so we have no ideas what we're gonna come up with."

    "We're hoping that through this, future leaders won't have the same problems we did," Green said.