Word: ficom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...groups planning spring events, beware. Like last year, it’s mid-spring and, with nearly two months of school left, the Undergraduate Council (UC) has already allocated 90 percent of the money in the student group grants fund. Last year, the resulting shortage led the Finance Committee (FiCom) to make a 45 percent across-the-board cut to the last grants package; the year before, the cut was 35 percent...
...FiCom, which is responsible for student group grants, risks running out every year because it has no budget. Each week, it reviews grant requests and approves the ones deemed reasonable on a case-by-case basis—with no regard for how much else is spent that week, how much the group has previously received, or how much money is left in the fund. FiCom therefore has little control over if or when the piggybank will run dry. Such a policy—or lack thereof—is fiscally irresponsible and is unfair to student groups with spring...
Unfortunately, grant requests are somewhat unpredictable. The largest packages tend to be at the beginning of the semester, but the amounts requested fluctuate from week to week and year to year. The solution, therefore, is to develop a flexible budget—not for FiCom to throw up its hands and refuse to manage its money at all. It could, for example, allocate a weekly target and set aside a small surplus fund to cover particularly large packages. Or, it could use a monthly budgeting scheme to allow for particularly high and low weeks...
...runs out of money and must make an end-of-the-year, across-the-board cut for all student groups in the last grants package, this practice is the most fiscally responsible, fair, and un-arbitrary way that the UC can handle its money shortage. The UC Finance Committee (FiCom) should be applauded for employing such a method already, and the cut should be institutionalized in UC FiCom practices for future councils to continue the practice...
...important to remember that the real culprit of this fiscal dilemma is neither fiscal irresponsibility nor inability of the UC leadership to budget their finances appropriately, but rather a vibrant student social life, an efficient FiCom doing its job in a timely manner, and a finite UC budget which will inevitably fall short of the demand for student group funding. So long as there is greater student demand than UC funds can accommodate, something’s got to give. The end-of-the-year grants package cut ensures that the UC handles this shortage consistently, fairly, and predictably, without...