The SFRB has recommended an overall increase to student activity fees of 2.45 percent for the financial year 2016. In the initial recommendations the board had recommended an increase of 5.29 percent from last year’s fee amount.
“We brought our preliminary recommendations forward and they have presented a couple of concerns. They thought that we could bring our percentage increase down and that is what they asked us to do,” said Rachel Williams, Associated Students of UNM president and chair for Student Fee Review Board.
SFRB has recommended increases in the budget of seven departments, clubs, organizations and projects.
The organizations, clubs or departments that have been recommended for an increase in funds include: New Mexico Union (Student Union Building), University Libraries, Information Technologies, Center for Academic Programs and Support, UNM Public Events (Popejoy Hall), Women’s Resource Center and Community Engagement Center.
According to the final recommendations document, applications from the Accessibility Resource Center, Sustainability Services/Green Fund, Student Patrol and an unnamed project proposed by The Dean of Students Office were not recommended for further funding due to different reasons.
SFRB has also made a couple of other changes, Williams said.
“They highlighted questions that they had about some of our recommendations. All the first-time applicants that SFRB recommended funding for, we actually took all of those units and moved them down into our one time beneficiaries,” she said.
She said SFRB has two budgets.
“There is the recurring budget and the roll over money from last year that is considered one time,” she said.
The SFRB decided to consider all of the pilot programs and fund them through a one time process, she said. The board has also recommended a decrease in funding of those units that have reserved funds.
The Global Education Office and Student Health and Counseling would have received funding but SFRB just recently recommended a slight decrease to its funding, she said.
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“It was brought to our attention by the Budget Leadership Team that some units have reserve funds that could potentially be packed into,” she said. “The Budget Leadership Team had suggested that we look into our reserve until we get out of this sticky situation.”
The units that were brought to their attention that had reserved funds were SHAC and GEO, she said. The board has recommended a reduction of $19,200 in the funding of GEO for fiscal year 2016. Initially the board recommended an increase of $24,389 in the funding of GEO.
“SFRB currently recommends funding GEO at $49,864 a reduction of $19,200 with excess funds up to $58,500 to be funded out of GEO’s reserves,” according the report.
SRFB would want to fund all of these units because they are such worthy programs or units, Williams said.
“In looking at the percentage increase and then after having talked to the budget leadership team, we had to get it down and we had to start making those really difficult decisions,” she said.
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @mianfawadshah.
