As the Student Government Association starts implementing its plans for the year, they will have to make adjustments to their budget.
The projected budget is estimated to need $111,697 in order to fulfill the plans of the executive board and its platform points. The board will receive $91,697, which is $20,000, or roughly 18 percent, less than the estimated need.
The gap will be reduced once the remaining unused funds from last year rollover, but about $3,000 was left over, said Kevin Mullaney, SGA treasurer.
SGA President Chloe Anagnos said some of the budget cuts will be taken out of the executive budget.
“I feel like we’ve always kind of had a buffer in our executive budget, and we pull from that if we need to,” she said. “That’s kind of what it’s there for, at least that’s my understanding of it.”
However, the budget allots $10,800 for the executive category, so the entire section could be cut and still not make up the $20,000 gap from the estimated to expected total budget.
Expenses in the executive budget include goals that the executive board proposed as platform points, including the Blue Light application and investments into boosting athletic event attendance. The section also allocates $1,000 for discretionary spending.
Anagnos said she is unsure of how cutting the budget down would affect the completion of the platform points and how much of the executive budget was used last year.
“I’m not sure how much of it was used in the past,” she said. “I just kind of hand my receipts to Kevin and say ‘Hey, do this.’”
Anagnos recently took over as president, and she said she is still adjusting to the new responsibilities.
The board had applied for a 3-percent increase in funding from the university, but did not receive it.
The other budgets — such as wages, publicity and co-sponsorshipÂÂ — generally stay the same, Anagnos said.
Mullaney will meet soon with the fiscal sponsorship committee to review co-sponsorship plans. The budget allocates $37,447 for co-sponsorship plans to aid other campus groups with programming.
Last year’s budget shows that part of the year hadn’t been filled out and lacked information for the money spent during the Spring Semester.
“I feel like [J.P. Bechtel, last year’s treasurer] just stopped updating it,” Mullaney said.
Anagnos said the filing process may have been confused, as errors were being corrected with last year’s budget in a different document.
“I’m thinking what had happened was there was a misplacement of one budget,” she said. “There was a mistake and they started doing it off of another one.”
Still, the plans for this year’s budget implementation and the necessary cuts have not been reviewed.
“At our last executive meeting, we didn’t talk about [the budget] a whole lot,” Anagnos said.
