Slightly more than a year ago, officials from the Student Recreation Center told the Programs Finance Committee and Student Senate that the rec center had been running a deficit since its opening. Within a few months, the Senate gave the rec center $190,000 to help with its budgetary problems. The center is still in debt and there do not appear to be any good solutions on the horizon.
Students built the rec center. In 1995, the student body voted to create a fee that would pay off the bond debt for the building. The $15.25 fee each student pays per term began in 1997 and will not expire until 2027. A separate fee, which up until now has been paid for by the incidental fee, was supposed to pay for the building’s operating expenses.
Now the rec center has refused funding from the incidental fee and is requesting that the Oregon University System create a new institutional fee, which will pay for its operating expenses. While we hope the rec center’s fee is approved so that it can stay open, refusing its traditional funding before it has secured a new fee is foolhardy. Even if the fee is not approved and the rec center is forced to close, students will continue to pay the bond fee on a building which they will be unable to use.
Last year’s fiasco made it clear that keeping the rec center within the PFC process was a bad idea. Students on the committee were unprepared to deal with such a complex budget, and the large increase the rec center needed was one reason student programs faced budget cuts.
The fact that members of the PFC had a hard time understanding the rec center’s budget was a result of the PFC system, which forces the committee to decide budgets for a high volume of groups in limited time. It was also the fault of rec center officials for not bringing the budget problems to the PFC’s attention earlier, forcing a steep learning curve for committee members.
Unfortunately, the committee that was given oversight of the rec center’s budget, the Student Recreation Center Advisory Board, is not given enough information to make meaningful decisions about budget increases. It has received no budget training (although the chairman insists it has), and is merely asked to decide how much of an increase in fees students will be willing to shoulder.
The University general counsel’s advice that the advisory board doesn’t need to follow public meetings law, based on the logic that it is only an advisory board and therefore makes no actual decisions, only gives credence to the perception that the advisory board has no actual control over the budget, and therefore over how much students will pay in fees.
Vice President of Student Affairs Robin Holmes correctly told the Emerald this week that students cannot get an accurate picture of such a complex budget in a 10-minute PFC hearing. Moving the group’s budget to a different committee should have been used as an opportunity to teach students the nuances of the budget so they can make an informed decision on how it should change. The rec center should present its budget to the advisory board in much the same way as a student group would present to the PFC. It should present all of its line items and explain why it needs to increase each one to maintain current service level or to allow for growth. The advisory board then should be given the opportunity to determine whether the increases should be approved. Giving the advisory board complete oversight of the budget, along with all the information needed to make competent decisions is essential in preventing further debt from accruing in the future.
The advisory board should be given the training and the power it needs to delve into the more complex budgetary concerns of the rec center, ensuring students have a meaningful amount of power over a building they built and pay for.