Most students are aware that the Government of the Student Body spends more than $1 million dollars of their student fees to fund student organizations. However, the majority don’t know what the process is to spend or get that money.

At Wednesday’s GSB meeting, the Senate voted on approving funding for nearly 200 student organizations.

With a budget of nearly $1.2 million to distribute, allocating the money is no simple affair. Before the Senate can approve the funding, someone has to decide how much money each group will receive. That someone is Steve Elliott, finance director, along with the 12 members of the GSB Finance Committee.

After working several weekends and late nights, the committee submitted a budget to the Senate for approval on Wednesday.

Of the nearly 200 groups who requested student fee money, the Senate voted to approve all but seven. Those seven were sent back to the finance committee for reconsideration.

All groups who wish to be funded by the GSB must submit a budget for their projected expenses and attend a mandatory financial hearing with the finance committee.

After the hearings, the committee makes recommendations on how much each organization should be funded. Once recommendations are made, the committee proposes a bill with the estimated allocations. Elliott said the Senate may either approve the funding recommendation or vote to send it back with a request to increase or decrease the amount of money recommended.

Only one group, The Drummer, was sent back with a request by the Senate to decrease the amount of its funding. The recommended funding for The Drummer was $10,676.40.

LAS Sen. Scott Milburn said The Drummer’s funding should be cut back because not enough students read the publication or are even aware of it.

“This amount needs to be downsized. This is ridiculous. There are a lot of other groups that need to be funded,” Milburn said.

He said the publication is a waste of paper compared to other campus publications and should not receive such a large amount of student fees. Instead, that money should be used to fund other organizations on campus that are overlooked.

Lucas Rockwell, production manager for the Drummer, said they were “very dissapointed” that the Drummer’s funding would be cut. He said if the funding was cut in half, there would be a serious decrease in the number of papers published next year. This year, the Drummer published six times.

“You can never bring up motives at GSB meetings, but we found it very suspicious that the Drummer was the only one to have its budget lowered,” Rockwell said. “GSB is supposed to do things objectively and impartially, and we think it’s strange that we were the only ones that got sent back.”

Six groups were sent back with a request to increase their funding. KUSR radio station and The Agriculturalist magazine were two of these groups. KUSR was recommended to receive zero funding by the committee. However, the Senate passed to send the recommendation back with a “demand to increase funds.”

Elliott said the finance committee recommended zero funding for KUSR because it still had nearly $5,000 left in its account from last year’s allocations. Because the radio station has been off the air since last fall, no operating expenses have been incurred, leaving the $5,000 unspent.

Instead of taking this unused money and reverting it to the GSB special projects account, which is what normally happens to all unspent student organization funds at the end of the year, the committee decided to allow the radio station to keep the $5,000 and not give it anymore.

Rian Harkins, general manager of KUSR, said the $5,000 in the KUSR account has to go to bills and equipment the station needs. After that is paid, Harkins estimates only $1,000 will be left for the station to run on.

“Things have happened fast in the past few weeks. We tried to cooperate with the GSB funding rules. We’d like to continue in the spirit of cooperation and ask you to think about our funding one more time,” Harkins said.

Another group having problems with funding is The Agriculturalist. This year’s recommendation for it is nearly $4,100.00 — less than half of the funding it received last year.

Darcy Dougherty, editor in chief of The Agriculturalist, said with the decrease in funding, the magazine will not be able to publish three issues a year like it has in the past.

“It will also hurt our editorial quality, we will have reduced color, reduced issues and the possibility of reduced pages,” Dougherty said.

She said it has been a very frustrating fight this semester to try and get funding for the magazine.

“I hope the finance committee can see that we need to acquire a few more funds than what they want to give us,” Dougherty said.

Elliott said the finance committee will meet next Tuesday and review the recommendations the Senate did not yet approve. If the committee chooses to follow the Senate’s request, it will either increase or decrease the funding to the groups. At next week’s GSB meeting, a final bill will be presented for the Senate to vote on.

“They can either accept the committee’s next recommendation or not allocate money to the group, but they can not send it back again. We have the final say,” Elliott said.