Due to a 16-percent drop in the funding percentage the determines their budget, Category I student groups will need to do a little more fundraising this semester. The groups will receive 77 percent of the budgets they were allocated.

Although that number is higher than the 68 percent that was expected earlier this year because of money reclaimed after fall semester, it is still down from fall semester’s 93 percent allocation ratio.

The funding percentage, which applies only to Category I groups, correlates to the amount that student organizations are expected to fundraise on top of their allocation.

“Historically, [the funding percentage] is actually pretty high,” said sophomore David Cohen, chair of the Budget Committee. “The thing is, the funding percentage varies from semester to semester just depending on ideally how much.”

Some student groups, though, have found this change in funding to have a significant impact on their group’s activities. Spires, a literary magazine on campus, consistently publishes every semester but finds its funding changed due to the funding percentage.

“It has kind of put us in a somewhat bad spot. I think we can raise the extra money. The decrease in funding has made it so we don’t have enough money to publish, so we’re trying to find ways to make up the deficit,” said senior Peter Billings, former treasurer of Spires.

The funding percentage has been as low as 51 percent, during the spring 2006 semester. The Budget Committee derives the funding percentage by dividing the total SU budget—which the Senate and Treasury approve at the end of each year—between the fall and the spring semesters.

“If you’d like to allocate—I’d say this is a pretty good number,” said Cohen
Coming into each semester, SU reviews each student group’s submitted budget and decides which programs they want to fund. The body then looks at how much money those programs would cost, divides it by the amount of money available from the budget and comes up with the funding percentage. The rest of the money needed for those programs must come from the groups’ independent fundraising, or from SU’s appeals budget.

“Looking at the percentage alone can be a little misleading,” Frank Beling, speaker of the Treasury, said. “If you look at how much money is allocated to the groups, it hasn’t varied that much, but depending how much the groups require the percentage will be higher or lower.”

The funding percentage affects groups in different ways. While some groups such as Dance Marathon request the majority of their funding in the fall semester, other groups request the majority of their funding in the spring semester, sometimes not even requesting an allocation for the fall.

“We’re not necessarily allocating less money than we have in the past,” Beling said. “Historically groups have required more one semester than they have the other semester. We try to allocate in a way that will best benefit the groups.”

Beling said that groups request more money in the spring and that SU did account for that when dividing the budget. He added, however, that several special programs occurred in the fall needing money—such as events surrounding the election and the opening of the Danforth University Center, each of which mandated a special fund, surpluses of which have been rolled over to the spring.

Discussions on how to adjust the semester-by-semester allocations are ongoing.

“What Treasury talks about all the time is how to balance spending throughout the year,” he said. “It is a year-long account. One thing that Treasury tries to do is allocate money… in order to create as much programming spread out over as much time as possible.”

According to Billings, however, that the low allocation percentage may prevent the group from publishing the magazine.

“We could potentially work something out with our printer, but that would be undesirable,” Billings said. “Worst case scenario would be the magazine wouldn’t be printed. We would do all the work for it, and it wouldn’t be printed.”