As members of the ISU men’s swimming and baseball teams hand in their uniforms, student representatives hope to continue work with Athletic Department personnel to ensure future budget cuts do not translate to program cuts.

ISU Athletics Director Bruce Van de Velde announced Monday that the men’s swimming and diving and baseball programs would be cut from the department starting in 2001-2002 because of decreasing revenues.

After the men’s swim team spoke about possible budget cuts at last week’s Government of the Student Body senate meeting, GSB authored a resolution trying to prevent the cuts from happening.

The resolution stated, “In the event that the Athletic Department chooses to cut any or all non-revenue generating sports, the students of ISU will seek a proportional decrease in the amount of student activity fees directed to the ISU Athletic Department.”

GSB President Ben Golding said the Athletic Department receives $1 million in student fees each year, which is only about 5 percent of the non-revenue sports’ budget. The combined budgets of non-revenue, Olympic-style sports account for $5.2 million of the Athletic Department’s $20.2 million budget.

“As of right now, there isn’t anything that GSB can do about the cuts,” Golding said. “The student fees recommendations for next year have already been made. This is something that next year’s senate and next year’s student fees committee will have to consider.”

Four GSB representatives, including Golding, Vice President Lisa Dlouhy, Finance Director Steve Medanic and Student Fees Sen. Alex Olson are on the university student fees committee.

“The athletic budget is not something we are going to be able to remedy,” Medanic said. “The cuts came because the money simply wasn’t there. They had logical reasons and the cuts had to happen.”

Olson, vice chairman of the finance committee, said the Athletic Department didn’t have a choice about whether to cut these programs.

“Hopefully, we will be able to work with the university to try and ensure that these types of programs are not cut any further,” he said. “However, anything we do now won’t impact it. We have to try and think of this in the long term and not for right now.”

One possible solution offered by Medanic was for the teams to work through Sports Club Council to become ISU club teams. GSB will look to see if more student fees money should be given to maintain the club-sport organizations.