MSA prepares budget

By Erica Zucco

Published April 11, 2008

The Missouri Students Association Senate held its second reading of a bill to approve its fiscal year 2009 budget on Wednesday and decided to allow until April 16 for senators to review the proposal before approval.

At a Senate meeting Wednesday, Budget Committee Chairman Aaron Wynhausen said since the committee had already met with all individual committees in MSA to discuss changes from last year’s budget, he wouldn’t address minor changes and would only explain the $11,000 removal from STRIPES’ budget.

“STRIPES’ gift fund reached $46,000 this year, which is more than MSA allocates to them each year,” Wynhausen said. “We decided to kind of force the hand of STRIPES to use that money by reallocating $11,000 from their budget and requesting they supplement their MSA budget with money from their gift fund.”

Budget Committee Vice Chairman Seth Botts said STRIPES had agreed to this change before the budget committee made the change.

“STRIPES said they were actually okay with us taking more than that, but $11,000 was all we needed to make the necessary fund reallocations,” Botts said.

The budget committee also presented two other pieces of legislation.

One was a request to designate MSA contingency and reserve funds remaining from fiscal year 2007 to furnishings for the new student center.

Wynhausen said the money would begin a Student Union Furnishing Fund.

Wynhausen also presented an act to carry over the original projection of $40,474.42 from the fiscal year 2008 budget to the New Student Center Equipment Fund.

The act cited MSA Senate Speaker Jonathan Mays’ review of PeopleSoft expenditures, which found that the original carryover projection was incorrect and would be closer to $116,746.04.

Mays said that because of mistakes in the estimation of how much money STRIPES will spend by the end of the year, the new projection is lower. The mistakes arise most significantly from their rent and gasoline budgets.

STRIPES Director Domingo Pacheco said the carryover estimations suggested STRIPES would not use any of the $3,123 left in their rent account, which would instead be spent renting cars and leasing their facility. The estimations assumed a remaining $3,790 would not be spent on gasoline, even though STRIPES still has nights of operation.

The carryover estimate also suggested STRIPES will spend no money on telephone bills or supplies before the year’s end. But soda and other items are purchased on a weekly basis and telephone bills will continue until STRIPES ceases operation for the year.

After meeting with Pacheco, Mays concluded that STRIPES would have a new projected carryover of $815.09, resulting in a projected Department of Student Services carryover of $5,982.01 and an overall MSA carryover of $109,285.07.