Editor's Note: The original version of this story incorrectly attributed a quote to Senator Brad Sedillo, when it was said by Senator Tyler Wafer. The Daily Lobo regrets the error.
The Associated Students of UNM struggled this week to allocate funding across campus.
The undergraduate student governing body's finance committee spent 17 hours finishing the spring 2016 budget, granting student organizations funding for projects and events, only to have full senate table the budget, and send it back to the committee to reevaluate numbers.
The total amount requested from all UNM organizations equaled a little over one million dollars, according to ASUNM documents, which is about $300,000 more than ASUNM has available to allocate.
Scribend - a nonprofit, annual print publication of creative work by undergraduate honors students - suffered the biggest reduction of funds. The publication, also produced by honor students, has received funding from ASUNM every year for 30 years to print their publication, and had their funding reduced by 95 percent.
The reasoning behind this reduction is that Scribendi is not actually an organization, said Member of Finance Committee Senator Sally Midani.
ASUNM Senator Sally Midani, who sits on the finance committee, said the reasoning behind the reduction is that Scribendi isn't technically a student organization.
"There is a professor that teaches this class, you receive credit hours from taking this class, there are certain resources offered by being a part of the honor's college, the hours that are required outside of in-class time seem like a homework-type situation. Basically everything that classifies as a student organization seems to fall under more of a class than a student organizations," Midani said."We just want to be fair to all of our other student organizations."
Four speakers spoke, during the section in the meeting devoted to comments from the gallery, on behalf of Scribendi. Scribendi Editor in Chief Caitlin Carcerano read a letter on behalf of a faculty advisor speaking in their defense.
"It saddens me to hear that on the eve of our thirtieth anniversary with UNM right after we have a feature article from the UNM alumni association magazine, making it to the final round for a national award for the fifth time, that UNM would like to defund one of its most recognized undergrad student organizations," Carcerano said.
Senator Tyler Wafer said Scribendi could have created an organization in order to receive funding.
"As I see it now, it is a class requirement to print the magazine and the funding has to come from somewhere," Wafer said. "There's no doubt that (Scribendi) has been extremely beneficial to campus for both students and alumni. I don't mean to demean Scribendi in any way, but it almost looks like an organization was created to elicit funding from ASUNM."
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Throughout ASUNM's deliberations on the budget, senators frequently asked members of the publication questions.
The consistent questioning eventually led ASUNM Vice President Alex Cervantes to ask Attorney General Lauren Dennis if tabling the budget and scheduling an emergency Senate meeting in front of the finance committee would follow ASUNM guidelines.
Cervantes said she was uncomfortable that some senators hadn't prepared beforehand in gathering the necessary knowledge about some of the student organizations, including Scribendi.
"The budget as it stands, even if nothing is changed with any organization, is still unbalanced. A couple of senators have gone out and done their research, others have decided not to do their research of certain student organizations," she said. "It concerns me as vice president to have this many senators ask questions of media and gallery in the meetings and it also concerns me when senators have to step out to speak to organizations because information wasn't clarified before the meeting."
After Dennis said that such an action could indeed take place, Senator Nathan Siegel made the motion to table the budget for further deliberation at an upcoming meeting.
Later, Senator Delia Brennan motioned for the budget to be sent back to the financial committee instead of just another full senate meeting.
Members of the finance committee disputed Brennan's suggestion at first, but Midani said after consideration she believed sending the budget back to its foundation is the best option.
"The finance committee works very efficiently in terms of making reductions," she said. "If you give us the time to be able to go out to student organizations like we did with Scribendi we can find where this money can be taken from, thus in the most fair way possible, as opposed to making the decision right here right now without talking to the students first."
The finance committee will be meeting on Friday to balance the budget before the full senate meets again the week after spring break.
Denicia Aragon is a staff reporter with the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com on Twitter @dailylobo.
