The Student Senate committee in charge of deciding how to spend more than $700,000 in over-realized funds has narrowed the field down to about 30 proposals sponsored by committee members.
Groups and individuals who proposed the ideas now sponsored by Senators will be invited to speak at next Sunday’s 6 p.m. meeting of the appropriations committee. They will likely be given six minutes to speak on their proposals followed by a brief question-and-answer period.
Committee chairman Jacob Daniels said he will send out e-mails informing those people that they can come speak at the meeting.
Members of the appropriations committee spent the last two weeks looking through the 75 proposals – including ideas submitted by six business administration classes who came up with proposals as a class project – to decide what they wanted to sponsor.
The committee will spend the rest of the term narrowing the field down to two packages, each totaling around $800,000. It will then schedule a town hall meeting for late in week two of spring term so that members of the University community can voice their opinions.
Only the 30 or so proposals that earned the sponsorship of a committee member will be considered from here on out.
“I’m excited to see Senators sponsor a wide array of ideas,” Daniels said. “There’s obviously not any agenda on anyone’s behalf. They’re looking at this from a neutral stance.”
Each Senator on the committee sponsored ideas that varied widely in both the type of idea and cost.
Sen. Jeremy Ebner’s sponsorships ranged from providing umbrellas for campus tours to installing solar-powered street lights for the more poorly lit areas of campus.
Several members of the committee sponsored a proposal from Campus Recycling to purchase biodiesel vans and Daniels said that as chairman, he did not sponsor anything, but if he had he would have sponsored that request.
Sen. Bryanna Mannis said she also sponsored a proposal to build a biodiesel processor on campus.
“I think that if we support the biodiesel vans it would be a really good idea if we had a processor on campus as well,” she said.
Ebner said he wants to be sure that each package contains a diverse group of ideas so that they don’t wind up pitting one package of just capital projects against one package of proposals from programs.
He said his ideal package would contain one big capital project, two or three midsize ideas and a handful of smaller ideas worth $1,000 or less.
“What’s the best use of this money,” Daniels said. “We’ll make sure to keep competing interests at bay.”
Sen. Sara Hamilton said she hopes the winning proposals will be one-time expenses that will pay for themselves.”I’m looking for something that has a long-term effect that can actually benefit students because it’s students’ money,” she said. “I want to see this money spent in a way that could possibly lead down the road to sustaining itself.”
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