As president of the Twin Cities Student Unions Board of Governors, I’d like to inform the campus community of the very serious impact this year’s Student Services Fees Committee recommendation will have on how the student unions serve the campus. By a narrow 3-2 margin, the committee voted to cut the unions’ operating budget next school year by $360,000. Their rationale? “The amount requested for (Minnesota Programs and Activities Council’s) programming is a concern” and “(Twin Cities Student Unions) can continue to maintain the facilities well while running the maintenance department as efficiently as possible Ö using student employees as often as possible.”
I will only briefly address the first concern as Molly Gale, the Minnesota Programs and Activities Council president, went into great detail on this issue in a letter to the editor published March 11. The majority of the committee (three people) wrote, “Diversity is greatly enhanced when student groups are not tied to the funding or demands of a small group of council programmers. There are sufficient funds for large-scale programming that only an organization such as the council could provide, including Homecoming and Spring Jam. A portion will be returned to individual students, who can best determine how to contribute to the University community.” If the fees committee is implying that our programming is not diverse and determined only by a few people, I’d like to point out that the council comprises 24 students chairing 11 different committees which include approximately 200 volunteers. This is a large group of individuals that plans and implements more than 750 events yearly, all of which offer a diverse array of performers, musicians, artists, speakers and films.
As it currently stands, the council has been cut by $300,000 (a cut of 61 percent of current level), but the fees committee provided no plan for giving that money to other groups. It will simply be lost and you’ll see less than half of the current programming on campus next year.
Results from our 2004 Coffman Union’s survey revealed that of the students who had an opinion, 59 percent thought there could be more programming or that there is definitely not enough to do on campus. I hardly see how “returning our funding to individual students” will ensure more diverse programming. Who are these groups or individuals and do we know if they even have the desire and time to plan programming? I, along with the other two fees committee members who voted not to cut our funding, don’t want to leave something so crucial to our college experience to chance. I hope you don’t either.
Now to the issue our fees committee took with our student staffing salary request. We assume that a couple fees committee members noted the increase in student salaries from what we spent during 2003-04 and what we’re requesting for 2005-06. While the fees committee focused on our facility maintenance area, increases occurred across all areas of the unions because of a University mandated salary increase for students, equity adjustments we had to make to be competitive with other University departments and either filling positions that were vacant in 2003 or staffing up to meet customer demands with increased business traffic.
The student unions employ 220 students and return $1 million in fees to students in the form of wages. Employees, together with our volunteers, make up 54 percent of our staff. With building traffic up 38 percent since fall 2003 (now averaging 15,000 to 18,000 people a day) and the number of event reservations up 17 percent (829 more events), the need for a large number of student employees is evident. Thirty-five percent of our student salaries go just to support our events and conferences department, through jobs such as custodial and maintenance, setting up for meetings, providing building security, reserving rooms and providing audio visual assistance. It’s a big operation and it takes hundreds of people to keep it functioning properly. We’re always looking for more efficiency. Maybe if the fees committee had more thoroughly read our written fee request, they would have discovered that we’re already doing what they recommended: “using student managers in our facilities and retail areas,” “using students to do custodial and set up on weekends” and “scheduling fewer staff at off-peak times.”
With the final administrative hearings to be held today from 2 to 4 p.m., I’m asking students who enjoy our programming and think the Twin Cities Student Unions Board of Governors is doing a great job adding value to the campus, to stand with us and voice their concern of the fees committee’s flawed and confusing recommendation.
We aren’t asking for an increase over last year’s budget. Actually, we’re even absorbing inflationary increases, such as heating and cooling bills that continue to increase and some of our mandated salary increases. So, at this stage we can only hope that Jerry Rinehart, the associate vice provost for student affairs, will agree with us, see that the fees committee did not take their role seriously or make sound justifications and reverse their decision. Please help us preserve what we have worked so hard to build, the best student unions in the country, by showing up and supporting us today.
Om Padhye is the president of the Twin Cities Student Unions Board of Governors and a University student. Please send comments to [email protected].
