ASR proposes raise in fee

ASR cannot allocate enough money to all organizations due to low student activity fee

by Sneha Janardhanan

The Association of Student Representatives hosted an all-student town hall meeting on Wednesday to discuss increasing the student activity fee from $90 to $111 per semester. ASR hopes to implement this increase for the 2011-2012 academic year.

At the meeting and in Coates on Thursday, over 200 students signed the petition supporting this change. The petition will be presented to the Board of Trustees by Emmalee Bannon, president of ASR. If the Board of Trustees approves the proposal, it will go to Dennis Ahlburg, president of the university, who has the final say on the outcome of this proposal.

According to junior Kate Fulkerson, vice president of ASR, the increase in student activity fee is necessary because it hasn’t changed since the 1980s. Fulkerson said that because of this, ASR has not been able to meet the full needs of student organizations.

Raphael Moffett, director of Campus and Community Involvement, said ASR had to allocate the bare minimum to organizations.

“We had to do a lot of cutting last year from everybody, so the need for the activity fee to go up is here,” Moffett said.

There are currently two changes that ASR is looking to make. The first one is to increase the student activity fee and the second change is to revise the way allocation currently takes place.

As of now, 23 percent of the student activity fee is directly allocated to athletics and 4 percent is allocated to the outdoor pool. Seventy percent is used to allocate to student organizations and 3 percent is allocated for ASR’s expenses.

The proposed allocation process will be such that 89 percent of the student activity fee will be allocated to student organizations, while 3 percent will pay for ASR’s standard allocation and the remaining 8 percent will pay for ASR’s part-time accountant’s salary. Fiscal Affairs will take care of funding athletics and the outdoor pool.

But the current proposal ASR is working on is targeted only towards increasing the student activity fee. They will be proposing the change in the allocation process next semester. Once Fiscal Affairs approves the change, ASR will have to conduct a student-wide vote.

ASR will also focus on streamlining the eligibility of organizations to be funded. Currently, ASR has no clear guidelines for which student organizations can receive funding.

“Definition of what is eligible for funding will be more definite,” Bannon said.

The increase in the student activity fee is a one-time change and any subsequent increases in future years will be decided by the ASR representatives in those years.

“The redistribution from 73 percent to 89 percent (for student organization allocations) will stay, but the amount by which we are planning to raise the student activity fee is just this year’s decision, and we’ll have to wait and see what the numbers look like next year,” Fulkerson said.

Next year’s ASR could further increase the activity fee depending upon the need of students and how the allocation process goes this spring.

“At first we talked of doing a $60 increase with increments over three years, so every year there would be a $20 increase and it would end up being a $60 increase,” Fulkerson said. “But with the restructuring of the system with Fiscal Affairs, we thought that might not be necessary. Our plan is just to make this decision now, see how the budgeting process goes in the spring and make that the prerogative of next year’s ASR. We’re kind of carving a path for students to do that, because there is really no literature on how to increase the student activity fee,” Fulkerson said.

Trang also pointed out that this increase in student activity fee will display obvious changes in student programming and events.

“The tuition fee has gone up every year I have been here, and I still can’t point out one tangible change,” Trang said. “With this $21 per semester increase, you will see a difference.”

Fulkerson also thinks this increase in student activity fee is required to sustain even just the basic needs of many organizations, like Campus Publications and Trinity Diversity Connection.

“It comes down to the functionality of those groups and whether they are able to pay for what they do every single year,” Fulkerson said.

According to Trang, increasing the student activity fee could result in better events on campus.

“If we want higher quality, something that’s going to attract attention of students, this the first step to take,” Bannon said.

In the current setup, ASR only has about $128,800 to allocate to student groups, though they intended to fund them with about $240,000. If the redistribution plan gets approved, ASR will have about $246,000 to allocate to students and student groups.

Senior Phil Jensen, director of the Student Programming Board, attended the town hall meeting on Wednesday and thinks increasing the activity fee is a good thing.

“The fee increase is going to provide an opportunity for student organizations to put on the events to the extent that they want to, which in turn will make for better events th
at students will want to attend,” Jensen said.

According to Bannon, this proposal has been well received by the student body with the exception of one e-mail she received. ASR hosted tables in Coates and Mabee yesterday and will today to get the petition signed by students and to gather as much support in favor of the proposal.

“ASR has done a great job of working through this transition process,” Moffett said.