SFC leaving budget cushion

The Student Fee Committee is currently wrapping up the initial budget allocation process for the 2010–11 academic year, and the results will be available for student groups to view online today. The total initial allocation is about $400,000 less than the total amount initially requested by student groups.

“This will likely change after appeals but we wanted to leave a cushion,” said Student Fee Committee Chair Johnnie Ozimkowski.

Student groups have a week from tomorrow to sign up for an appeal of the initial budget allocation at the Student Activities and Leadership Programs office.

Domanic Thomas, SALP assistant director, said “there will be ‘cuts’ or differences in asks to allocations by the boatloads in the next few weeks.”

Thomas understands that the SFC will be reviewing the budget to get a “$14.5 million ask down by at least $2 million. Otherwise, the fee would go up another $15 to $20 [per] term [and] student.”

He said, “Mathematically, there is no way everyone can get what they want without the student fee rising.”

Ozimkowski is confident about the allocations being made this year. He feels that this year’s group is much different than last year’s.

“Last year, there was a black-and-white imaginary dichotomy of us-versus-them, students-versus-administration,” Ozimkowski said.

That has not been Ozimkowski’s experience at PSU. He feels that employees work here because they want to and because they want students to succeed.

Ozimkowski said in the past, groups could ask for anything and they were consistently given what they asked for, “if not more.” The student fee allocation was not on a sustainable path.

According to Ozimkowski, this caused a “split between people using and paying for services.”

He aims to serve more of the 28,000-plus PSU students, and “serve a wider array of people being taxed for these services…[and] increase access to all students instead of some students.”

Ozimkowski said he aims to be transparent and for the SFC to remain viewpoint neutral when making allocation decisions to keep the student fee low.

Thomas said, “[This year’s SFC] philosophy is to focus the use of student fee dollars to create an impact and focus programming [and] services here on campus.”

He applauds this year’s SFC.

“This group has greater understanding of the long term,” Thomas said. The group has been making tough decisions, in the hopes that the budget will be more sustainable in the future, he said.

There is virtually no training for the SFC.

“We [train] students for one month before they make their first decision—sometimes not even that,” he said.

The legal aspects and accounting information that the SFC has to understand and implement can be difficult, and Thomas says it is different for each student, based on personal goals and causes.

His advice to the members is to look at the big picture and “understand ramifications of all your decisions.”

In general, Thomas has seen the current year’s SFC group communicate very well. Sometimes they “disagree [with each other] vehemently” but he stressed that it’s OK to disagree as long as they keep in mind how they treat each other and the info they use when they disagree.”