By the end of Wednesday night, the ASUO Senate may have spent nearly all the money it had to give.
Ten groups came to the EMU Walnut Room to ask for money, and if the Senate granted all of their requests, it would have spent more than $60,000 of the roughly $66,000 it had left in its surplus fund, which it uses to help finance events student groups can’t fund by themselves.
The meeting dragged on late into the night, well past the Emerald’s press deadline, and looked set to go beyond midnight. By press time, the Senate had doled out almost $26,500 without hearing the largest request, from club lacrosse. Visit dailyemerald.com/news for complete coverage of the Senate’s spending and its other decisions that night.
The bulk of the money requested from the Senate came from club sports teams going to national championships: men’s lacrosse and both women’s and men’s ultimate frisbee teams, whose requests totalled more than $40,000. The men’s and women’s ultimate frisbee teams are going to championships in Madison, Wisc. Each is ranked number one in the nation. The lacrosse team has gone to the tournament in Denver, Colo., already.
However, despite the large amount requested to begin the meeting, it was unlikely the meeting would end with the full $60,000 spent.
The Senate trimmed amounts of money from several groups’ requests. The Chinese Students and Scholars Association requested $1,900 to publish another issue of its HuaFeng magazine, which is printed in both English and Chinese. CSSA has printed two other issues this year, one of which was also funded by the Senate.
The Senate cut $300 from the CSSA’s request, eliminating 150 of the 450 issues the group sought to publish.
The Senate also refused to fund a request from GLOSS, a graduate linguistics student organization, because the request was to raise funds for outside scholarships.
[email protected]