By Michele Richinick
The Budget Review Committee (BRC) met with student leaders Monday night in a second attempt to discuss various solutions to change aspects of the BRC’s process for allocating money to student groups.
About 50 students attended the meeting in the Curry Student Center. They remained calm and listened to each other’s opinions, unlike last Thursday’s meeting that shifted to an airing of accusations against the BRC.
“The best thing that came out of the meeting was that there is now a running dialogue, a discussion, where groups are finding more confidence in [the BRC],” said Joshua Torres, executive vice president for the Latin American Student Organization (LASO), in an interview with The News. “The BRC is listening to students’ needs and taking them into account.”
Matthew Soleyn, the Resident Student Association (RSA) vice president for housing services, said there still needs to be a continuation of looking at what the solutions will be to provide flexibility and fairness to student groups.
“The meeting was a lot better than last Thursday,” he said. “Last Thursday was really about [student groups’] getting out their frustrations, getting out their anger. This week was more of developing a solution that will work.”
BRC chair Jennifer Hardy presented solutions at the meeting, including ways to improve the request process, the breakdown for large, medium and small programs, increasing communication between members of the BRC and student groups and liaisons’ accountability.
Leaders of the student groups at the meeting gave their opinions and other solutions related to the BRC’s ideas.
Most of the students agreed on forming liaisons between BRC members and student groups, Hardy said.
“Everyone there had only positive things to say about it,” she said. “They think it is a great idea. We’ll try it. It can always be tweaked depending on how much the committee members can handle.”
With liaisons, BRC members would be responsible for directly communicating with particular student groups about the program request process, reviewing the requests and making sure the groups understand the process, Hardy said.
“If a group has a question, the committee member can answer that,” she said. “They will actually be getting an answer if they have that one person to ask and go to. The committee members make the decisions, so they are the best people to talk to about it. It will be more personal for a lot of student groups.”
Other solutions discussed included moving away from the six to 10 week margin for when program requests must be presented, to moving to six to 10 weeks from the start of the month in which the event is set to happen so all programs could be heard in a three week period, Hardy said. The first come first serve process for request funding is still in question, she said.
“There were a lot of different ideas for solutions,” Hardy said. “Some are more long-term things we can look at for next year or the year after. If the system is not working, it can be changed around.”
Rob Ranley, president of the Student Government Association under which BRC operates, said he thought the meeting had a calm atmosphere and was easier to run than last week because of the attendees’ willingness to focus on the policies and think of suggestions and solutions to the problems they have been having with the BRC.
“We still have a little bit of finalizing to do on some of the bigger changes,” Ranley said. “Some things we can do now and some things we can argue on forever. I think we will work them out.”
There will be a follow-up meeting next week, most likely Thursday evening, Hardy said.
The BRC members will take the feedback from students and possibly have solutions to see what will work best for the most groups, she said.
“We’re not going to go against what students have suggested,” Hardy said. “It’s almost impossible to please everyone, but as long as we have a majority of students behind a plan I think that’s what we’re really looking for.”
For the next meeting, Torres said he hopes the solutions will be ready for implementation.
“At this point we do need to get on track for the spring semester and get discussions to come to an end and try out different things to see if they will work or not,” he said.
