Days after the ASUO Senate agreed to add as much as $166,000 from state tax credits to its own surplus account, the ASUO Executive said such a move would violate rules that prohibit mixing University funds with student fee-generated money.
Senators agreed Wednesday to place money earned by the University through an environmental initiative into the ASUO’s surplus fund, an account used to finance the needs of student groups. However, ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz said over the weekend that ASUO Adviser Consuela Perez-Jefferis told him the money could not be legally added to the surplus. ASUO rules state that the Senate may only vote upon the allocation of money raised through student fees. Perez-Jefferis could not be reached for comment.
Because no written resolution was presented, the vote was non-binding. Senators said they merely voted on the issue to give University administrators an idea of their position.
The money in question was raised through the Oregon Business Energy Tax Credit program, through which the state rewards businesses for lowering their carbon emissions.
During a meeting in December, the Senate voted to support using $20,000 of the tax credit to fund late night service for the 79x bus. At the time, Dotters-Katz asked to have the remaining money put into two funds he controls, one of which is used to fund equipment for the EMU. Senators declined his request, saying they feared a lack of checks and balances.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Sen. Hailey Sheldon said the Senate could choose between two destinations for the money: the surplus or the ASUO’s over-realized fund, which the Senate cannot use until spring. The Senate voted to put the money in the surplus, a decision Sen. Tyler Scandalios described as “a slam dunk.” Sheldon reassured senators that the money could enter the surplus, saying she had not heard otherwise from the University’s lawyers.
“They did not actually say it couldn’t enter surplus,” she said at the meeting.
ASUO Vice President Johnny Delashaw, who represents the executive branch of the ASUO on the Senate, did not attend the meeting. Dotters-Katz said Delashaw had an allergy attack Wednesday that affected his eyes, leaving him unable to drive. Dotters-Katz said he was forced to drive Delashaw to Portland and miss the meeting. Discussion of how to spend the remainder of the tax credit was not on the agenda released before the meeting. Instead, the Senate moved to add it after the meeting began.
“I find it very problematic that they, after seeing no executive representatives at the Senate meeting, would add a motion to the agenda to move over $150,000 into their own discretionary aProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
ount,” Dotters-Katz said.
Sheldon said during the meeting that she believed Dotters-Katz was in favor of moving the money into the surplus, though Dotters-Katz said he never told her that was his position. She later characterized the statement as “a huge misunderstanding.”
“He said that he wanted to spend it on major and minor equipment reserves and normal means would be to take it out of (the) surplus,” Sheldon said.
Dotters-Katz said he favors using the tax credit to fund environmentally conscious student initiatives with a bidding process similar to the one used to distribute over-realized funds in the spring of 2008.
[email protected]
Decision to move funds overruled
Daily Emerald
January 25, 2009
More to Discover