The director of the Financial Counseling Clinic said he may seek other employment if Government of Student Body senators accept finance committee recommendations to significantly lower the funding of the organization.

“I can’t imagine myself staying here long in that capacity,” said Mark Oleson, director of the Financial Counseling Clinic.

After a budget balancing session in which the GSB finance committee cut $42,000 from student organization requests, the Financial Counseling Clinic suffered a blow.

After regular allocations hearings three weeks ago left the Financial Counseling Clinic with $48,000 of its $79,000 budget request intact, further cuts brought the group down to $28,000. This amount, if approved by the senate, will be insufficient to provide the services the clinic has in the past, Oleson said.

Committee officials said the rationale behind the further cuts was to fund the clinic as a student-run organization rather than a professional entity, as originally intended.

“What I did was I kind of determined what GSB intended the clinic to be when it was first created,” said Casey Harvey, member of the finance committee. “The intent then, I felt, was teaching students how to deal with their finances, and allowing them to learn about finances, and hopefully preventing the occurrence of debt problems.”

Harvey said he’d suggested the clinic revert to using part-time graduate students as counselors.

Oleson said while the service had been primarily undergraduate-run when he started five years ago, he felt the changes being made to the clinic’s format over the past few years had been beneficial to students.

“When I first got here, the vision I had for the clinic was that it needed to be more professional in order to provide a valuable service to students,” he said.

“The reason I’m here is that I was able to get the support I needed to make those changes. If all of the sudden we go back to the way we were before, I don’t have any interest in staying.”

Harvey said Oleson’s decision to leave if the finance committee’s recommendations were upheld was his own prerogative.

“The thing is, Oleson has been trying to manipulate the clinic into something else without the approval of GSB,” Harvey said. “And if he wants to quit over it, that’s his decision. Students will move on. There are businesses and offices that are willing to perform this service themselves at a lower cost to students.”

The senate’s acceptance of the finance committee’s recommendations would also mean the loss of a job for Clark Grinde, the clinic’s financial planner and counselor.

“My problem with the finance committee’s recommendation is that there aren’t any part-time graduate students who can help students like I can,” Grinde said. “Here’s the bottom line: I want to keep doing what I’ve been doing, because I care about what I’m doing, and I want to make sure students get off on the right foot.”

Grinde said while he appreciated the situation facing GSB right now, he also feels the benefits of a Financial Counseling Clinic would be severely threatened by the cuts.

“It’s really up to the senate,” he said. “If they can look us in the eye and say, ‘We don’t want a qualified counselor,’ then that’s the way it is. But the counseling clinic may not continue to be an entity if they pursue the course they’re going in right now.”

Grinde has been working with the Financial Counseling Clinic since 1999.