The following are the opinions of UCSU Legislative Council Journalism Senator Veronica Lingo and do not necessarily reflect those of The Campus Press staff
How can you quantify a program? What does it mean to place a price tag on something like an art gallery, or a wellness kit? I can tell you what it means, it means rigging the game to set each of these programs up to fail. In a way, I feel that this entire budgeting process has been a game, setting us all up to fail.
And one, two, three.
There is no doubt that University of Colorado Student Union faces enormous pressure during budgets. We must simultaneously live up to the demands of having a well-rounded supply of programs and institutions for our students while at the same time restrict the cost of student fees. It’s important that we maintain the balance.
For some background on how budgets work – three cost center (UMC, Wardenburg, etc.) scenarios are finally presented to Legislative Council: one where the cost center must cut programs and services, one where they maintain the status quo and a third, where they present desired programs, should they get extra funding.
It has always been the case where the most common and reasonable approach to budgets has been to work with directors of cost centers to maintain a status quo. They’ve bit the bullet countless times to keep our fees down.
There’s been a cost though; some things cannot simply function at the status quo any longer. Wardenburg has repeatedly dipped into emergency funds to keep afloat without large fee increases and the UMC needs to perform maintenance in order to be up to fire code. There simply is no free ride. Not for anyone.
In all fairness – I’m not interested in trying to hide or misinform – a status quo still results in an increase in student fees. These costs are called unduckables and are such things as increases in utilities and salaries. In other words, unduckables cannot be avoided. It is estimated that unduckables will result in an increase of $300 per student per year – or $150 per semester – this coming year.
So, with steadily increasing unduckables and a massive capital debt to pay off, we students are left to pick up the tab, and your student leaders are left to deal with the not-so-desirable job of how to approach budgets.
However, there is a big difference between saying “enough” and saying “too much.”
“Masquerade, paper faces on parade,” a quote from “The Phantom of the Opera.”
And it makes an even bigger difference when the deliberation process is clouded in half-truths and fuzzy rhetoric. To begin with, the entire approach to the budget process has been framed around the idea that student fees are simply too high. Are they? In a comparison between Colorado State University and University of Northern Colorado, the semester student fees for CU for this past year seems pretty reasonable between two of the largest institutions in the state, let alone the fee increases both CSU and UNC will be experiencing this year as well. Currently CU charges $326.14 per semester compared to CSU’s $460.57 and UNC’s $337.00.
There are even fuzzy definitions. In a conversation before last weeks meeting, a fellow senator asked of me, “How can people even call what we are doing cutting funding or programming?” Let me give it a shot – “cutting” is deliberately establishing an environment and parameters, which force an organization to sacrifice goods and services in order to survive. So yes, what we are doing is cutting programming and services.
Throughout the entire budget process, there have been deliberate actions designed to curb cost center appeals and representative retaliation on the Legislative Council.
Many junior representatives on the Legislative Council were never properly informed on the budgeting process and its protocol and Legislative Council leaders did not stop to educate them. So who’s to blame here? I am not the only member on Legislative Council who has done this before, and yet I have been one of very few to really discuss the unusual nature of the process this year with my fellow representatives and senators who lacked the necessary context.
Not only were our own representatives subject to shabby treatment, but cost center directors, too, are subject to clandestine whims.
How and why is it that cost centers were not properly informed when the Legislative Council president decided to cut the final opportunity to plead its case? Normally, directors are given two hearings in order to discuss their funding. After many large cost centers testified in the first hearing, they were told via e-mail that this would be the only opportunity to do so. I’m sure if they were aware of a change in protocol that hasn’t been altered in a decade, it would have changed their level of persuasion.
The rules of the dance have been changed and we are all two stepping to someone else’s tune. And me without my tango shoes.
And so this brings me back to my question, how can you quantify a program whose value is to enrich our campus? In the immortal words of Representative Chris Klein, do we need to “push an agenda” to see it?
If we were truly about cutting programs that did not appeal to the highest numbers of students, the first cost center on the chopping block would be the Rec Center. After all, it only brings in 1,500 – 3,000 students a day, whereas the UMC brings in 16,000. That’s over five times the amount of students on the high end. In our current student fees, there’s only a $13.85 difference between funding the two.
As of right now, the Rec Center is skirting by with the coveted zero-plus unduckables scenario. I am not really questioning the validity of what Rec Center does for campus in way of promoting a healthy lifestyle and teamwork through intramural sports. What I’m saying is nobody else did either. In an eight-hour long grill session over why there is a need to put hand sanitizer in wellness kits, no one dared ask why the Rec Center was deserving while others were not.
And the pace of the tune quickens.
Legislation to pass the budget en masse may be proposed as early as this Thursday’s meeting. If we are all in this together and doing this for the students, we all should demand the due transparency and, at least appearance of serious consideration of budgets and what it could mean for the future of CU.
