Members of student government and student programs are scrutinizing the process by which the ASUO Programs Finance Committee allocated more than $4 million to student groups this year because some say PFC abused its power.
Student representatives made allegations that the committee didn’t adequately prepare groups to present their funding requests and used inappropriate criteria to evaluate those requests as large blocks of student money hung in limbo. The Oregon Daily Emerald also reviewed poor or incomplete accounts of the meetings and had difficulty obtaining public records.
The money PFC divides up is drawn directly from student pockets as an “incidental fee” when they pay tuition. The fee pays for everything from student football and basketball tickets to the expenses of programs like Project Saferide, which offers women safe transportation at night.
ASUO senators passed the approximately $4.3 million PFC budget on Feb. 27. Two senators who voted against the proposal, Peter Watts and Andrew Elliott, said they thought PFC number-crunching was top-notch but questioned the conduct of PFC members at several meetings.
They, along with other student groups like the Oregon Commentator, said PFC ventured into inappropriate territory when members let personal judgments interfere with their decisions to award funds to certain groups.
“Everybody who deals with budgets must look at a group based on merit, not based on their point of view,” Elliott said. “They must divorce their opinion from the decision.”
The meeting minutes from the Commentator’s Jan. 17 budget hearing have PFC member Joe Streckert making personal assessments about the conservative news magazine’s political leanings and its mission statement.
“I find a fair amount of your mission statement is inappropriate for a student group,” Streckert said at the meeting. “The place for a mission statement is not to … make derogatory statements about other groups or organizations. You are insulting faculty and other organizations.
“I won’t approve anything that way. It’s an insult.”
Streckert said Tuesday that in retrospect he “would have liked” to push his personal opinions aside but still believes the Commentator’s budget was decided on merits, such as spending history.
Commentator business manager Justin Sibley said he understands that meetings can become heated and tempers can flare. “There’s no way any person can put away personal biases,” Sibley said. “That’s why it’s completely unreasonable for only four people to make a decision on that amount of money.”
The PFC is composed of seven members elected to one- and two-year terms. Two seats were vacated and not restaffed this year. The lack of members didn’t violate Oregon Public Meetings Law, but the small board caused some to raise the issue of adequate representation.
“I think it should be more than seven,” Watts said. “I think anytime you have a larger group working together you get less mistakes.”
The Greek system’s Panhellenic Council said it experienced a PFC mistake firsthand. The group complained that their PFC liaison, or “tag,” hadn’t specified what information PFC would seek during the Panhellenic’s Feb. 4 budget hearing. The tag is charged with preparing groups for what PFC expects.
“If PFC had pointed out their concerns ahead of time … the hearings would be a lot smoother and a lot less antagonistic,” Panhellenic adviser Shelley Sutherland said.
Sibley agreed.
“When we go to our budget hearing, we shouldn’t have any surprises,” he said.

Record keeping
PFC criticisms extend further than the board’s conduct during meetings. The group’s record-keeping practices have been called into question. The only public record — outside of Emerald articles — that remains of the PFC’s deliberations over how to allocate more than $4 million dollars is a pile of incomplete minutes and tapes rubber-banded together and grouped by meeting night.
Oregon Public Meetings Law requires governing bodies to make recorded accounts of discussion at meetings. The “minutes need not be a verbatim transcript,” but they “must give a true reflection of the matters discussed at the meetings and the views of the participants.”
But when Emerald reporters went to listen to tapes chronicling budget hearings of Feb. 4 and Jan. 17, they found significant gaps in two tapes and no audio on three others.
And for the meetings that have minutes and verbatim tapes, sometimes the written summaries don’t completely reflect the verbatim speech. These meetings involved important discussions about the Commentator’s mission statement and the Panhellenic’s budget hearing.
“We found out later that the tape recorder was broken,” PFC chairwoman Mary Elizabeth Madden said of the Feb. 4 meetings. “The administrative assistant did her best filling in during the meeting.”
Kate Shull, who said she recorded PFC minutes during the Feb. 4 and Jan. 17 meetings, said she always reviewed tapes after meetings to ensure the thoroughness and accuracy of her work.
“There are definitely some points where I don’t catch everything,” she said. “But I try my best to remember and convey what the group expressed.”
Madden and Streckert confirmed that PFC approved the minutes from the Feb. 4 and Jan. 17 meetings. Shull said she believes if PFC recruited more recorders, the minutes would be more accurate.
Ben Buzbee, this year’s ASUO vice president-elect, said PFC needs to be reformed in some areas. He favors more PFC representation and wants to add two at-large positions. Watts also is talking reform. He is having informal discussions with other senators about making PFC a for-credit course.
“If a grade and class credit were on the line, there wouldn’t be people dropping off PFC,” he said. “Overall, the PFC did a good job this year. It’s a difficult job and it requires lots of hours and work. They were trying hard. There were just a few instances that made me uncomfortable.”