No groups were left unfunded when the Government of the Student Body ended its process of allocating special funds to groups for spring this past weekend.

The GSB Finance Committee held hearings Friday and Saturday for groups that requested funding from the Special Allocations Account to determine if the items they requested funding for fell under GSB’s bylaws.

After all hearings, the finance committee decided to recommend that all 18 groups receive funding.

According to GSB bylaws, the Special Allocation process is where newly-formed groups and any other groups that were unable to receive funding during Regular Allocations last spring can request funding for the coming spring.

The bylaws also state groups that received Regular Allocations cannot receive Special Allocations, unless the group has incurred unforeseen expenses. Four groups that received Regular Allocations last spring for this fall and spring semester were given Special Allocations for this spring, due to unforeseen expenses.

The committee will recommend to the GSB senate a total of $18,981 be allocated to fund the groups.

The GSB Senate has the authority to approve or deny all funding to campus organizations.

The senate can divide out any groups it wishes from the committee’s list of recommendations and separate the groups into individual bills. As a separate bill, the senate can approve funding for the rest of the organizations and either change or deny funding for each group that has been separated.

The senate will make its decision on funding at its Nov. 5 meeting.

“It went very smoothly, and I was happy to see that no one got zero-funded,” said GSB Finance Director David Boike. “Most groups got what they asked for if they were criteria items GSB can fund.”

However, Boike said he had expected the process to be more difficult because of the impact the budget shortfall GSB incurred last year had on student organizations this year.

Last year, a change in policy by the Iowa Board of Regents in the way student fees were assessed and collected caused GSB to over-estimate the amount of revenue it was going to bring in from student fees money. The over-estimation led GSB to allocate more money than it had collected, creating the shortfall.

GSB reduced the amount of money it allocated to groups from the Regular Allocations Account this year to help make up for the shortfall.

“Monetarily, [funding] went better than last year,” Boike said.

He said this year’s Special Allocations process was easier because budget cuts and restraints forced them to a very narrow set of options.

“We didn’t have to worry about having a lot of money to spend and having a lot of options to do that in this year,” Boike said. “We also had fewer groups this year, when I thought there were going to be more than last year, because of the number of groups who indicated they would seek Special Allocations funding this year and because of how GSB had to cut back the amount of money it gave out in [Regular Allocations] last year.”

Boike said the fewer number of groups asking for money made it easier for the committee to recommend fully funding every group’s criteria items with the amount of money it has to do so.

The committee only recommended the senate allocate $18,981 of the $27,000 in the account.

“There weren’t enough criteria items in groups’ budgets to justify spending all of the money,” Boike said. “We’re not going to spend it all just because we have it. Even though we have extra money, we have to follow the guidelines and rules set by the senate.”

The leftover money in the account will be transferred into the Regular Allocations Account to benefit groups during the Regular Allocations process, he said.

Eric Jennings, president of the Life in Iowa club, said he was pleased with the committee’s decision to fund his club, but was confused with the financial process.

“Since I’m new and inexperienced to the process, I was taken aback by it,” said Jennings, senior in history. “I didn’t understand what was going on [during the club’s hearing] and what the process was.”

The Life in Iowa club is a service group that travels to communities in Iowa to perform service activities to help those communities.

Jennings said he understands the committee is there to criticize his and other clubs’ budgets. He said the committee did its job well and he is happy with their recommendation to fund his group.