All,
Attached is the SBA budget recommended by the Budget Committee. This year’s requests were descriptive and much more reasonable than last year’s. No requests for coat racks this time. Thank you. Your efforts made the budgeting easier. But the process of setting an achievable budget was still difficult.
Some statistics:
—$14,400 was available to fund student groups
—29 requests were submitted
—$42,688 was requested
No students chose to attend the budget committee’s three and half hour meeting last Sunday. So to provide transparency the following is a summary of the committee’s process and reasoning:
Each group’s request was individually reviewed and discussed by the full budget committee. As prescribed by the bylaws we considered the following factors:
—Educational value of the programs;
—Number of students in the organization;
—Number of students who will benefit from the programs;
—Benefit of the programs to the law school and the community as a whole;
—Past performance and use of allocated funds by the group;
—Merits of the programs.
As in past years we declined to fund any travel-related expenses, national membership dues, alcohol, or journal subscriptions. These reductions did not bring us close to the $14,400.
We then scrutinized proposed food spending. We reduced the per head food budgets of some groups to bring them in line with the majority of the food budgets, e.g. from $7/head to $3/head. We also struck funding for some meetings altogether when the proposed number of meeting was out of line with the number of meetings the majority of groups proposed. Additionally, no funding was awarded for “executive” meetings, meetings of only four or five members.
Groups not chartered by the SBA were not awarded any funding at this time. These groups may request funding from the contingency fund once the budget is approved. $1,600 of the contingency fund will be available each semester.
These steps got us close the $14,400 so we further reduced all group budgets by ~8%. No group’s funding was reduced below $200.
The full SBA senate will vote up or down on the budget at this Friday’s meeting.
If you have any questions or concerns please contact me or any of the Budget Committee members before Friday’s meeting.
If the attachment did not make it through the listserv it can downloaded or viewed here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ploAscRwkFkdUPn0b1tltIw
Scott Brenner
Kelly Brandstetter
Lane Blake
Zach McCune
Mohammed Misbah
University of Cincinnati College of Law is the fourth oldest continually running law school in the United States and a founding member of the Association of American Law Schools. It was started in 1833 as the Cincinnati Law School. Then-dean and future 27th President of the United States, William Howard Taft (1880), merged it with the University of Cincinnati in 1896.