The meeting was supposed to be the blockbuster Programs Finance Committee event of the year — a bureaucratic episode so dramatic and so epic that last year’s OSPIRG Campus Organizer Ben Unger compared it to “The Lord of the Rings.”
But Thursday night’s Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group’s PFC hearing fell far short of expectations, to the relief of many who showed up to support the group. This year’s meeting, which resulted in a 4.17 percent funding increase from last year, drew a few more than 20 people and lasted less than two hours.
Kit Douglass, OSPIRG program
coordinator, said before the meeting she was confident the meeting would go well because OSPIRG worked especially hard this year to work out any kinks in its budget
before the hearing.
Last year, OSPIRG was nearly
defunded because of concerns over the transparency of its budget.
“This year, we’ve worked to make the budget easier to understand,” she said.
In fact, the group didn’t receive its executive recommendation until 45 minutes before the meeting
because both parties were “still providing information to one another,” Douglass said.
ASUO Finance Coordinator Mike Martell would not comment before the meeting on whether OSPIRG had received its recommendation.
The Executive came in with a recommendation that would have decreased the group’s budget, but
OSPIRG co-chair Stephanie Erickson pointed out that the recommendation was based on an incomplete audit, an act she said didn’t make sense.
She added that the recommendation was also based on the group’s budget from fiscal year 2003-04, when its budget was cut to
less than $100,000.
“We’re doing more programming. We’re engaging more students.
It doesn’t make sense to cut us,” she said.
ASUO Vice President Mena Ravassipour concurred, and added that it was the PFC’s responsibility to use its discretion and take these sorts of
circumstances into consideration.
“That’s part of the beauty of
being PFC, because that’s your job,” she said.
PFC co-chair Mason Quiroz raised concerns that the budget wasn’t transparent enough. As a contract group, OSPIRG provides its own
audits and has only one line item in its budget, and the money is sent to the group’s umbrella organization, Oregon State Public Interest Research Group. In the past, critics have said this has allowed OSPIRG to shirk fiscal accountability.
“It makes me uncomfortable to fund them when I don’t know where the money’s going,” he said. Quiroz left the meeting before a vote was called.
PFC member Jael Anker-
Lagos countered that she felt the group’s funding practices saved
students’ money.
“I want to think of OSPIRG’s
money being sent off campus as
saving University of Oregon students money,” she said. “It’s going into a big pool and being maximized.”
The PFC fully funded all but one of the group’s requested increases for a $120,074 budget. OSPIRG’s request for $13,000 for an additional environmental advocate was denied.
The Oregon Commentator, the University’s conservative journal of opinion, has long been a vocal critic of OSPIRG. In fact, former Editor in chief Owen Brennan Rounds sued OSPIRG and the State Board of Higher Education in 1998 on the grounds that the incidental fee violated his associational first amendment rights by funding OSPIRG.
The Oregon Commentator’s current editor in chief, Tyler Graf, criticized the PFC for its inconsistency and said he felt OSPIRG wasn’t “advantageous to the cultural or physical development of students,” a necessary tenet for any student group to receive incidental fee funding as defined by Oregon statutes.
“It’s simply a way for lobbyists in Portland to get money from students,” he said. “The PFC is sending a message that isn’t consistent. They’ll nickel-and-dime other groups, but they’ll give OSPIRG over $100,000.”
Douglass responded that OSPIRG has shown it is in fact beneficial
to students.
“It’s been proven year after
year that we play a vital role on campus,” she said. “With an on-campus internship, students have the opportunity to take the knowledge they learn in the classroom and apply it to the real world.”
Also at Thursday’s PFC meeting, the Sustainable Business Symposium received a 9.7 percent increase for a budget of $8,411. The organization is responsible for promoting sustainable business practices and hosting a symposium in the spring. The increase was especially welcome given the group’s ambitious aspirations.
“We’d like to create a ‘Sustainable Business Month’ and we’re
trying to make Oregon the sustainability state,” SBS Project Manager Kyle Smith said. “I know those are lofty goals.”
The increase included money for a fall speaker series.
The PFC also approved the ASUO Student Senate’s budget. Some
debate arose as the PFC grappled with what stipend the Senate vice president and Senate ombudsman should receive.
PFC member Khanh Le argued for more money in the office supplies line item for tapes to record meetings.
“We need the tapes and sometimes we go over because people talk a lot,” he said.
The PFC passed a $25,749 budget for the Senate, a 1.26 percent increase. The budget includes additional money for advertising.

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