It seems Club Sports will have to wait a little longer to get a lot of money much earlier than needed.
After making a very public push to have the ASUO Senate earmark $55,000 of surplus funds — more than 30 percent of the funds remaining for the year — for Club Sports to compete in national tournaments should they make the cut, Sen. Lyzi Diamond decided to postpone her request until next term.
“It has come to my attention that many Senators do not have enough information to make an accurate and informed decision on the motion,” Diamond wrote in an e-mail to senators Monday evening.
Diamond wrote that she intends to draft a formal request for the funds with “additional documents and materials” so everyone can be better informed next time. She also included an apology to Club Sports Director Sandy Vaughn for “seemingly (dropping) the ball on this.”
Her original concerns were that Club Sports will need money to go to nationals and Senate could run out of money to fund every team, as happened two years ago to club baseball. Club Sports is funded under the EMU Board, and this year received more than $373,000 in
incidental fee funding.
But the possibility of going to nationals cannot be built into the budget a year ahead of time. There’s no telling which teams would qualify or how much it would cost to send them at the time the year’s budget is drafted. Thus, every year Club Sports goes to the Senate to request surplus funds to go to the tournaments.
Club Sports always gets the money it wants, as long as the funds are available. In the past three years, just to keep things current, Club Sports has received the largest share of surplus funds of any program funded by the ASUO.
In 2006-07, Club Sports got $40,677 — 16.7 percent of all surplus funds. The next year it received $14,043, which accounted for more than 7 percent of a large surplus fund in 2007-08. Last year, Club Sports took 19 percent of surplus with $35,954.
None of this is meant to imply that Club Sports does not deserve the funds. As Diamond points out, it does massive amounts of fundraising. It’s preeminent “everyday student” programming that appeals to a wide constituency who may or may not participate in other extracurriculars funded by the ASUO. It fulfills the incidental fee’s cultural-and-physical-development-of-campus mantra far better than funding Campus Recycling or the Career Center, which are basic services the University should fund.
The question is whether Senate is ready to take another leap toward what former President Sam Dotters-Katz calls “the sophistication of the ASUO polity” by making a habit out of earmarking early in the year.
Senate Vice President Nick Schultz said Diamond is “doing a great job of thinking ahead, which is something Senate hasn’t always taken the time to do.” But Schultz said discussion needs to take place about how Diamond and Vaughn arrived at the amount that will be requested.
“Earmarking $55,000 this early in the season, that’s making a lot of assumptions about where the teams are going to be, what flights and hotels are going to cost,” Schultz said. Though he said he would likely support earmarking funds for Club Sports once his questions are answered.
But Diamond may have reason to be concerned. A large number of surplus requests this week total more than $10,000. If Senate meets ten times in each of the next two terms and approves that much spending each time, though that’s very unlikely, there would not be any money left for Club Sports.
Still, it’s fun to think about how many other programs could inspire this kind of foresight and it will be fun to watch which senators will take the lead in earmarking funds in what has been a first-come, first-served process. It probably says as much about what those senators want to be doing at the beginning of spring term (when they run around in colored T-shirts and try to get you to vote on DuckWeb) as it does about where the Club Sports teams will be during spring term.
Coming to a D.C. hotel room
In other news, today Sen. Zach Stark-MacMillan, OSPIRG board chair Charles Denson and ASUO Legislative Affairs Coordinator Rachel Cushman will be attending President Obama’s jobs summit in the White House. Cushman said the three were nominated by individuals in the northwest and then selected by the Youth Clean Energy Forum. Stark-MacMillan and Denson organized PowerShift West; Cushman said she was selected for her sustainability work with Native American tribes.
The three will be in D.C. for two nights. Cushman said she intends to invite Obama to the Civil War.
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