This year's SGA has been given an unique task - putting an unusually large General Ledger fund to work for students. This money has been given to us by students for the purpose of benefiting students, not for sitting in a university bank account where it can't even earn interest. Through projects like the Study Place and GPS system, and even more so with Prove It, we have tried to put this money back into the student community.
The way it works is that each year, the SGA budgets their income for various purposes. Whatever is unused at the end rolls into the GL, including unspent money allocated to student organizations. Because neither the SGA nor student organizations have been spending all their money for several years now, the GL has grown quite large.
As a result this years' SGA has an unprecedented ability to do things itself where other departments on campus may be falling short. While this is good in the short run for solving problems, I am concerned that not enough attention is being paid to affecting more lasting changes. The GL will not always be this large and if there comes a time when we need to tighten our fiscal belts, we need to have had progess in place. The alternative is that when the money runs low, all of our great initiatives die, and I don't think anybody wants to see that happen.
1 comments:
I'm really glad that you posted this because I'm not sure if people think about WHERE all of this money is actually coming from... and it completely slipped my mind that we might not have this much money to spend on projects like Prove It in the future.
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