Lights, camera, still no action for Viking Vision

Portland State’s media-centric student group Viking Vision is scaling back its resources, after initially requesting and then rescinding a $3,500 budget request from the Student Fee Committee for the 2008-09 academic year.

At their annual budget meeting with the Student Fee Committee (SFC), Viking Vision president Bryan Riester decided to cancel the group’s budget request after reconsidering their initial request because the group had not been productive.

Karla Hernandez, the group’s liaison to the SFC, said in an e-mail the group decided that requesting any student-fee dollars would be inappropriate, because they had not been able to produce any recent work that was valuable to students.

The decision marks the second year in a row the group has refused student-fee funding, after Riester gave over $13,000 in available reserve funds back to the SFC last year.

“We, the student body, are pumping literally millions of dollars into student groups, even though only a small portion of the student body are involved,” Riester said. “That’s unacceptable.”

This year the SFC is responsible for allocating $12.4 million in student fees to student groups, including athletics and the Vanguard.

Over the last year, Viking Vision has been flying under the campus radar in an effort to retool after previous group president Richard Juden graduated.

“It’s [Viking Vision] just taken on several incarnations since Richard took it over,” said Rick Arnold, the group’s adviser and manager of the distance-learning center. “They’re kind of rebuilding out of the ashes right now.”

Because there is a lack of steady group members and no clear focus for the group up until this point, Viking Vision is scaling back until there is more demand and interest in their services, Riester said.

“We can be measured by the amount of student interest we have, and by no other metric,” he said.

Another goal of Viking Vision is to reduce the amount of bureaucracy they must deal with, Riester said. The group can afford not to have a budget now because they already have purchased a variety of media equipment, such as cameras and editing software, he said.

The group said it needs to work on making itself more stable for the future, Hernandez said in the e-mail. Riester came up with a five-year plan that would not spend student fee money needlessly when Viking Vision is not actively working on any projects, the e-mail said.

Plans included finding other means to broadcast programs the group created while not wasting money on equipment they don’t need, Hernandez’s e-mail said. Additionally, Riester’s plan said the group could make commercials for other student groups.

Riester said he hopes Viking Vision can scale back and become a Student Organization Council (SOC) group.

“The SOC is a simpler bureaucratic process to work through,” Riester said. “Reducing the bureaucratic overhead is one of the necessary parts of pairing ourselves down before expansion.”