The graduate student government approved a slew of appropriations and, after lengthy, heated debate, adopted new rules for the distribution of the state's graduate research fund during its monthly meeting Saturday.
The most heated debate during the Graduate and Professional Student Association's four-hour meeting was over guidelines for the Graduate Research Fund.
The fund was established by the Legislature in 1992 and is now at its healthiest level, with $185,000 in reserves and more expected from the state for next fiscal year.
This was the first year the council had allocated any of the research funds, with law student Keith Valles supervising an ad hoc committee that followed other GPSA formats for distributing funds.
In order to permanently set up the new research allocation process, the council had to approve constitutional amendments Saturday to meet the ballot deadline for the upcoming student election.
With such a substantial fund, the council had decided to pay Valles a $3,000 stipend. His committee put forth a recommendation that the chairperson and administrator of the fund be the same person and that the administrator receive no less than 3 percent and no more than 5 percent of the funding being allocated for projects during the school year.
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Council Chairperson Bill Dials expressed concern that the rules stated that the GPSA president was in charge of choosing the administrator and setting the person's salary, leaving too much room for problems.
"We can't work off the assumption that we will have as good a group of people in the future as we do right now," Dials said. "This just leaves too much room for politics to overshadow and bring this very important funding process to a grinding halt."
Jenks echoed Dials' concerns but argued that the president should at least be able to recommend an administrator and salary, pending council approval, because council only meets monthly during the fall and spring semester.
After considerable debate over the appropriate way to compensate the committee, the council finally decided on numerous friendly amendments and the bill passed unanimously.
It allows the president to appoint and set a salary for the Graduate Research and Development Fund chairperson, pending council approval.
That person's salary should be no less than 3 percent and no more than 5 percent of the fund being allocated and cannot exceed $3,000 annually.
The committee members are to be paid no less than 4 percent and no more than 6 percent of the administrator's salary.
"This is a really important system, and we have to set it up so that it has all the appropriate checks and balances," Dials said. "It's a lot of money from the state and the allocation process will really reflect on how well GPSA does its job."
During the same meeting, GPSA approved allocating $12, 790 of the $19,741 it had available to a variety of groups seeking funding through its spring budget process.
Graduate student Aaron KÅgler told the council that the Finance Committee funded every group that met its deadline. The only group that did not get funded was the ASUNM Film Committee because it is an undergraduate student government executive agency.
"It was the toughest decision I have had to make since I did chair ASUNM's Finance Committee when I was an undergraduate, but we just felt that such a decision would really open the door to other undergraduate executive agencies seeking GPSA funding," he said.
While several groups did not receive full funding, KÅgler said that the committee gave them all suggestions on how to earn more money in the future, emphasizing the improvement of graduate student participation.
The council then used some of the Finance Committees' remaining funds for specialized travel and special projects, which both had seen an influx in requests that exceeded their budget.
The Finance Committee retained $2,176, with a minimum $1,000 required by the GPSA Constitution to cover any spring budget process appeals.
Buck Creel, chairperson of the Specialized Projects Committee, asked the council to suspend its rules to allow the committee to exceed its $500 maximum allocation and transfer funds from the Finance Committee to cover any projects it could not already fund.
In the biggest transaction of the day, GPSA approved allocating $2,125 in addition to the $500 already awarded to the Community Experience to pay for a dinner at the conclusion of the Spring Storm, an all-day community service activity on April 6.
At President Rachel Jenks' recommendation, the council added the caveat that the Community Experience must send GPSA a report on how it spent the allocation.
The council also awarded $362 for the Anthropology Association and $708 to the Society of Latin American Students for a forum about the Argentine economic crisis.
Each allocation was in addition to the $500 allocated by the Specialized Projects Committee.
The council voted against awarding an extra $100 for the English Department's Southwest Symposium, which was held during the weekend, asserting that $500 already funded by the committee was enough when combined with the English Department's contributions.
