The next few weeks will be crucial to the ASUO Senate’s Over-Realized Fund committee, which wants to distribute the approximately $200,000 in unallocated incidental fee money to ASUO programs for large events on the University campus.
Senate already allocated $65,000 of the fund to the Jewish Student Union to host a concert planned for the end of the Spring ASUO Street Faire.
The over-realized fund is created because student enrollment projections are lower than actual enrollment. Because the incidental fee is assessed to all students equally and decided before the school year starts, if there are more students than predicted, there is more incidental fee money than necessary.
At its initial meeting last Tuesday, the committee decided on a slogan to publicize the fund to students as well as a general blueprint for the mechanism of distribution. The committee also elected Sen. Evan Thomas as chairperson of the committee.
The committee heard from several suggestions from Sen. Kristina Harding before agreeing to the name “Big Ideas.”
“It’s a lot of money, part of the rules is that it has to affect large groups of students,” Harding said. “I felt like it should be sort of about big ideas, or it’s kind of catchy too.”
The group’s next project is to advertise the fund to all students and create an online form for students to fill out. Sen. Emma Newman suggested use of the Google Docs form system where results from student groups are deposited into a spreadsheet.
From the information Thomas provided, the form will ask questions similar to the surplus request form, including the name of the group, its qualifications for dealing with larger amounts of money and general budget information.
The application will be created at the committee’s meeting on Tuesday, and students have until the Feb. 13 deadline to file their requests.
While the Jewish Student Union event coming up will be a concert funded out of the fund, Thomas said he’d like to see more divergent ideas come from the committee’s work.
“We want to generate as many ideas as possible; the more ideas you have the more good ideas you’re going to have,” Thomas said. “Concerts are a stock response, but there’s a lot of things we can do with the money.”
Harding was one of the three senators appointed at the Nov. 17 ASUO Senate meeting to replace senators missing from the start of school on. She said she fears the three weeks open to students might be too short.
“Honestly, I’m new to this whole thing. I’m surprised we’re doing it different from surplus,” Harding said. “It seems like we’re really rushing it, only giving groups three weeks.”
Following the application process, the committee will hold a callback period with the best applications. The committee hopes to send its recommendations to the larger Senate before the end of this term. The rough timeline gives groups all of spring term to plan and put on events.
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Decision time for ASUO fund committee
Daily Emerald
January 23, 2011
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