SGA sets budget for fall semester programs
By Jessica Sanders
Staff Reporter

Although Student Government Association’s budget for the next academic year showed a $5,000 increase, student fees will stay the same at $20 a year because next year’s expected enrollment increase will spread the cost, said Brad Thompson, SGA president Tuesday.

A significant addition to the budget is the $2,200 allocated for a new Community Service Project account that will include programs like College Student for a Day, in which middle and high school students go through a day with a TCU student.

Previously, money for such programs came from leftover funds, but this year SGA wanted be sure there was money set aside for community service, said Thompson, a junior radio-TV-film major.

“Our theme for the year was community service,” Thompson said. “So we wanted to include programs that offered that.”

Thompson said they want to make a strong effort to better connect TCU with the local community.

The budget also included $500 for an online book exchange for students to sell their used books directly back to other students, but administrative resistance has brought the project to a stand-still, Thompson said.

Chris Mattingly, SGA treasurer, said if the money is not used for the book exchange, it will be used for other expenses.
“Oftentimes, other areas may need to go over-budget or there may be an event that we
didn’t necessarily prepare for that requires financing,” said Mattingly, a senior international finance major. “If that money is not used for the book exchange program, it will be used for overspending in other departments, or a project that doesn’t have funding in other areas.”

Programming Council treasurer Katrina Shutt said the new structure with program directors planning all events has made it easier to create a budget because they only have to plan for the next semester.

Though the programs are not changing, specific accounts were only made for fall programs because program directors will change each semester, said Shutt, a sophomore marketing and finance major.

“We felt that our group should not be planning projects for the next group,” Shutt said. “We allocated enough money but we didn’t assign it to spring projects.”

The budget for the 2003 fiscal year was presented to the House of Student Representatives April 8 and passed unanimously. Mattingly said he wasn’t surprised at the budget’s acceptance because many members of House and Programming Council had worked on it before it was voted on.

“It’s passed so many eyes by this point that the majority of the kinks have been resolved,” Mattingly said. “The majority of people that had comments or questions had resolved those issues before it came to the House floor since this has been an ongoing process.”

Though the budget is very thorough, the actual amount of money that will be spent in SGA cannot be determined in advance, Thompson said.

“The budget is an estimate,” Thompson said. “We won’t know the final numbers until well after school starts in the fall.”

Jessica Sanders