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Student Senate usually spends nearly all of its available funds by the end of the spring semester. This year, that day has come much sooner.

Senate has about $36,237.48 left to spend on funding student groups and projects for the rest of the school year. Senate started the school year with a budget of $108,168 and has spent almost $72,000 this semester alone.

Alex Porte, Great Falls, Va., senior and Student Senate treasurer, was disappointed to discover how quickly funds had dried up.

“Usually we have this amount left this time in April, and it’s not April.” Porte said.

Porte said Senate funds had never been this depleted by the end of the first semester. He said no single person could be pegged with making a wrong decision, but that Senate had come up short in the area of fiscal responsibility.

“I think the problem snowballed,” he said. “It puts such a financial strain not just on Senate but on students.”

Porte said that, by the end of the spring semester, he expected only half of all funding requests to be approved. He said that if Senate were to pass all funding requests next semester, Senate would be $4,000 in the hole.

But going in debt is not an option. If Senate were to run out of funds before the end of next semester, there would be no more money to fund student groups or programs through the end of the school year.

“It’s a difficult situation to deal with when you have such a small plot of money,” Porte said. “We have to remember there are a lot more student groups than just the ones on our docket for our meeting.”

Brian Hardouin, Broomfield, Colo., law senator and member of the finance committee, said the finance committee was responsible for allocating funds so students would be able to plan events and projects and operate smoothly.

“Finance puts lots of consideration into its budgets to make sure students are adequately being provided for,” he said.

One of the most controversial funding approvals this year was for Jayhawk Motorsports, a student group and recreational racing club that builds racing cars, because it received the biggest chunk of Senate funds this year: $10,085. Jayhawk Motorsports, which receives Senate line item funding every year, missed the line item deadline this year. As a result, the group requested and received a much larger amount of funding than it normally would have, Porte said. He said the group should have received less funding.

Another controversial issue in Senate is the amount of funds that have been given to engineering groups. Porte said that since the beginning of the semester, Senate spent at least 25 percent of unallocated funds on engineering groups.

After Jayhawk Motorsports, the next largest funding amount of $4,210 went to the Civil Engineering Society to build a steel bridge exhibit.

Andy Haverkamp, Hoyt sophomore and engineering senator, said that engineering projects were semester-long projects that any students could be involved in. He said student projects that spanned over two semesters were more beneficial than bringing speakers to campus for a couple days, which cost between $1,000 and $3,000.

Haverkamp said the early depletion of funds was a result of student groups becoming more active, industrious and effective. He said student groups were attempting bigger projects and, therefore, Senate saw larger funding requests that it didn’t have enough money to fund.

“We shouldn’t be playing God with groups,” he said. “Without funding, they die. We shouldn’t be allowed to kill groups because we didn’t prepare for them.”

The $17.50 Student Senate fee that every KU student pays generates about $850,000. About $740,000 of that is allocated to block funding and line funding and about $100,000 goes to the unallocated account. The unallocated account is the account that Senate uses to fund student group money requests throughout the school year.

— — Edited by Jennifer Torline

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