The Government of the Student Body is gearing up for its most important meeting of the year.

Wednesday night’s GSB Senate meeting will focus on passing the regular allocation recommendations for the approximately 140 student groups that have submitted budget requests.

GSB President Brian Phillips, senior in political science, said the meeting could be lengthy.

“It’s the biggest meeting of the year, [and will probably be] the longest of the year,” he said.

GSB Finance Director Ryan Myers, graduate student in accounting, said the meeting often goes long because senators are able to “pull out” organizations’ budgets to ask questions and discuss issues with each.

However, the process will not delay the majority of organizations from having their budgets passed.

Myers said groups whose budgets are not pulled will be passed without discussion.

“The individual groups get delayed,” he said. “[The budgets] can either pass, fail or be sent back to the Finance Committee,” he said.

Myers said it would probably take an additional week for the budgets sent back to the committee to return to the Senate floor.

As of Monday morning, organizations whose budgets are already marked to be pulled out and discussed include GSB, Veishea, International Student Council, YWCA and Engineers for a Sustainable World.

The organizations receiving money from regular allocations will receive their funding in October 2008.

Other bills involving regular allocations set to be resolved include those transferring $726.14 from the capital projects account to cover all requests in regular allocations, ratifying a contract with the Analysis of Social Services Evaluation Team, speeding up the legislative process by amending the agenda and allocating $1,003.62 from the Senate discretionary account to fund the tennis club’s trip to the national tournament.

Phillips said the contract with ASSET is a yearly bill which allocates GSB money for services provided to students and other citizens.

ASSET agencies include such service organizations such as ACCESS, Ames Community Preschool, Boys and Girls Club of Story County, University Community Child Care and the Richmond Center.

“We do allocate quite a bit of money,” he said.

“It’s an ‘every year’ kind of thing. The contracts have all been written up.”

Phillips said the bill that would amend the agenda could cause some confusion.

The bill calls for several changes in the agenda’s language in order to avoid controversy when senators believe a certain bill or issue is too important to go through the normal procedures of submitting legislation through the Senate.

“It’s never been a problem before,” Phillips said.

“They are interpreting things differently than they have in the past.”