Vincent Martorano is a freshman majoring in political science with a minor in business administration.
Oregon Daily Emerald: How would you plan to figure out how to spend the surplus in the budget?
Martorano: Surplus? We are projected to have a surplus in the budget?
Emerald: I think there is always a surplus allotted or factored into it so that it’s there for the year.
Martorano: Well, one thing I know we had a surplus last year, a few years ago, and we went ahead and built the solar panels [in EMU], I believe. And I was walking through the EMU like a week or so ago and I saw that the roof was leaking. So I think, if we were to spend the surplus it would be — I don’t know if I’d go along with something like building or buying solar panels. Maybe perhaps fixing some of the roofs and leaks in this building, or maybe allocating more funds to some of the team sports.
Emerald: What about the student groups or academic groups?
Martorano: Well it depends on how big it is — sometimes if it’s not that big it doesn’t make sense spreading it around because it doesn’t make a significant difference. But it’s nothing like — with the roof and a lot of people have called about that. I mean a lot of people have asked about that, about the roof leaking.
Emerald: In the EMU?
Martorano: Yeah. And you know, instead of doing solar panels, I think we should have taken care of that.
Emerald: OK.
Martorano: Especially since it’s in Oregon.
Emerald: If you are elected to the Finance Senator’s seat, how will you interact with the student groups?
Martorano: Oh, very much so. Well it will be mostly athletic department finance, so it will be mostly working with teams. My biggest thing right now is — I am a little frustrated about how the athletics baseball team is not a varsity sport. I know that’s more to do with things like Title IX and what not. It’s more complicated than it sounds, you can’t just go ‘oh I want it to be a varsity sport,’ but we are the only Pac-10 school without a varsity baseball team, which I think is very embarrassing. And baseball should basically be a varsity sport at every school because it’s so popular. I know we have a decent team. I know some of the guys, not closely, I mean I’m not really affiliated with the team, I just think that I feel that it should be a varsity team. We have a lot more women’s varsity programs than men’s so that’s something I think I would work at.
Emerald: What about non-athletic student groups?
Martorano: Well I don’t know if I’d be working too closely with any of them anyway, as far as athletic department finance. I mean, I’d work with them if I needed to, but I don’t know how often.
Emerald: What are the most important issues facing the students that you would be representing?
Martorano: Tuition hikes. Oh, representing for sports. Lets see. I haven’t really gotten a chance to look at how large our budgets are. I don’t know if they are hurting for money, I don’t know about Women’s Lacrosse, which was recently promoted to varsity. I’m not sure if they are yet, but I’m not sure if they are needing more funds or not. I haven’t looked, so that could be one thing that would be looked at — if they need more money, if they have too much money.
Emerald: How are you planning on running for the seat without knowing which athletic teams have enough money, don’t have enough money or have too much money? Is that something that you are going to look into and educate yourself on before the elections?
Martorano: Yeah, I’m hoping to. Yes, yes, yes. It’s been a couple days since we filed so it’s been a very short (time between filing) and this interview, so yeah, I do plan on looking up the budgets.
Emerald: What is the most important thing you should know in order to be able to deal with the budget process?
Martorano: Definitely working closely with my colleagues, knowing what they like to do, how they like to go about it, especially if there is going to be a lot of incumbents and returning people who have done this before, kind of feed of them, you know, go with their lead. You know, listen to the teams — I mean that would be the job as the senator in the seat, work closely with the teams, if they need money, if they desperately need it, you work with them on it. Or, like I said, they might have too much money, which no one is ever going to admit that.
Emerald: What about actual budgeting? What do you know about that, what do you want to learn to deal with the actual process of doing budgets and allocating money when there is more money needed than exists?
Martorano: Well it’s definitely forecasting. I know we do most of ours through incidental fees, so there’s no surprises, I believe. You pretty much know what you have set at the beginning of the year. I think that should be a very simple process, like you take the United States Congress…they don’t know exactly how much money they are going to have at the end of the year, they forecast, and they have experts who do that. But, they never know. There could be a recession, they may have planned to spend too much money or they spent too much money. And then we have a deficit. Here, we already know how much money we are going to have at the beginning of the year, that should be very simple. We should be able to spend our surplus.
Emerald: Well don’t you think it would get complicated when there just are more teams asking for more money than incidental fees exist because the incidental fees are divided among a lot of groups, not only athletic departments. So you’ll get your cut of the incidental fees and you’ll know what that is, let’s say, but if that’s not enough to cover all the requests and needs of the teams that are asking you for money, how are you going to deal with that?
Martorano: Well I don’t know if I would be as blunt, but if there’s not money to pay for it then there’s no money to pay for it, basically. One thing I would be interested in doing is go into groups that may take a lot of money, like OSPIRG and their budget, which is fairly high — and I haven’t really looked at OSPIRG so I don’t know if that’s ridiculously high or not — but I know a lot of people from just reading that in the paper, that they come crying about that saying ‘they don’t deserve all that money, divvy some of that out to us’. And so one thing, I may go to these groups that get a lot more money and try and work with them. You know, maybe cutting their budget and giving it to student groups or athletic groups that may need it.
Emerald: Now, as far as being an athletic department senator, what would you be willing to do in the event of a budget shortfall, a shortage of incidental fees, to send your groups — what kind of interaction would you be willing or wanting to do with the groups that you represent to help them make up the difference?
Martorano: Well one thing I think I want to educate myself on is how club teams go about raising money. I believe they are mostly self-sufficient, they have to do all their own fundraising, I have to check.
Emerald: I think they do fundraising but I think they are also funded by the EMU board.
Martorano: Well, like say in the case of a budget shortfall, say baseball comes to me and says they need a lot more money, ‘we want to go on a bunch of trips, trying to take care of the games, we just can’t do it.’ Well, maybe there is time to set up more fundraising, maybe they need to work a little harder and put in more effort. Maybe, I can work with them in trying to help set things up like that, maybe find money for them in the community. I think that’s a great thing going in the community. There a lot of people who you may not think it but they would be more than willing to donate money.
Emerald: What topics is the senate allowed to pass resolutions about?
Martorano: I’m not quite sure. I’m not quite sure what the rules are about what type of resolutions we are allowed to pass and how to — with our senate.
Emerald
: What’s the most important part of section 5 of the student senate rules and why?
Martorano: Section 5, could you…?
Emerald: These are just the questions we were given. I don’t know the answers to some of the things that you…
Martorano: Senate rules, we went over those a couple nights ago. Oh no, we went over the election rules. No, I couldn’t comment on that.