The Student Fee Review Board is recommending that students keep their pocket change.
The board recommended a 31-cent decrease over last year’s fees of $486.80 and will submit those recommendations to President David Schmidly on March 1.
At Thursday’s meeting, the board voted to fund the nine recurring organizations with the same amount they received last year. The board must provide recurring organizations with as much or more funding as the year before, except for a probationary cut not exceeding 5 percent.
ASUNM Chief of Staff Michael Thorning said funding groups the same amount they received last year will guard against increasing student fees.
“My recommendation represents keeping fees exactly where they are,” he said. “It represents providing stability and predictability for students coming to this University next year.”
The motion passed with the four ASUNM board members voting in favor and the three GPSA members voting against.
The nine recurring student groups are Student Health and Counseling, Athletics, the SUB, Recreation Services, Libraries, UNM Children’s Campus, Center for Academic Program Support, Student Government Accounting Office and Popejoy Hall.
GPSA board member Katie Richardson said the motion met some resistance because it would allocate the majority of student funds in one action.
“We’re going to decide $10 million in one chunk and spend the rest of the night on the last $700,000.” Richardson said. “Just think about how much these (recurring) groups are getting from students. It may not increase fees, but it does keep them level.”
The board voted to allocate student fees to all but one of the 17 nonrecurring organizations that requested funding. Campus Office of Substance Abuse Prevention will receive no money from student fees, if the board’s recommendations are approved.
Thorning said COSAP’s funding should not come from student fees.
“It was a state initiative that got put on the University, then the University put it on the students,” he said. “It’s a great program with a lot of potential.”
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Of the approximately 20 non-SFRB members who came to the meeting, about 10 were student volunteers from N.M. Public Interest Research Group volunteers.
NMPIRG requested $80,000, and the board originally motioned to fund NMPIRG at $60,000. Thorning , however, proposed to instead fund it at $52,242 because he said the group still needed to establish itself on campus.
Breanna Hastings, NMPIRG’s state and chapter chair, said the organization gives students the resources to campaign for causes of their choice. She said PIRG is running at its minimum capacity with the funding it receives right now.
“They (SFRB members) saw over 2,000 signatures on a petition, which said that UNM students supported having an allocation of student fees so that we can actually run our full program,” she said.
Thorning said his decision was motivated by keeping student fees stable.
“We were treating them the same as all the other groups,” he said. “So if we wanted to increase them, we would have had to increase student fees.”
The SFRB recommended giving American Indian Student Services $75,000, African-American Student Services $72,800 and El Centro de la Raza $103,000.
The SFRB allocated one-time funding to several groups, such as Information Technologies and UNM Bands.
The board allocated $100,000 to Parking and Transportation Services, under the condition that the city charges PATS less than the allotted amount and that PATS give the remainder back to the SFRB.
Japji Hundal, one of the GPSA members on the board, said he was generally pleased with the outcome and collaboration between graduate and undergraduate students.
“The bottom line was that both of us are trying to not raise student fees,” Hundal said. “It’s just that our methods were different. Both (groups) are there to have student voices heard. From a graduate point of view, every undergrad is a future graduate to me.”
Thorning said this year’s meeting was one of the “best policy decisions” that the board has worked on in years.
“We all walked away happy about it,” he said. “This was good government; this was compromise. Groups with similar, and at the same time different, interests came together and did good for the University.”
