Student Council is currently conducting the first-ever audit of spending under the Student Activities Fee. All University students pay $50 per year into the SAF, which is then used to fund student activities at Student Council’s discretion.
The audit of SAF spending was first announced at the Sept. 19 Student Senate meeting. Ty Zirkle, a third-year College student and Student Council’s vice president for organizations, said the audit would begin with data collection and eventually include a CIO census.
“We are looking for high student engagement since this affects all of us,” Zirkle said at the meeting.
Zirkle’s responsibilities as vice president for organizations include approving new CIOs and allocating money to fund them. Therefore, he is heading up the audit effort, although he said he hopes to expand the effort to include other Student Council committees as the process moves forward.
So far, Zirkle has worked closely with Alex Cintron — a fellow third-year College student and the vice president for administration — and administrators from University business services to collect data on CIOs’ spending since 2007. Both Zirkle and Cintron agreed that since this is the first-ever audit of SAF spending, but it’s still too early to say what sort of changes might be made as a result.
“We’re not looking to put the cart before the horse in terms of what we do with the data,” Cintron said in an interview. “We want to see the data and evaluate it, and that’s something that hasn't been done before.”
Still, Zirkle was optimistic that the audit would help Student Council work more effectively to support CIOs in the future.
“We’re interested in restructuring it to be better for CIOs and students in general,” Zirkle told The Cavalier Daily. “Always the goal will be to support [CIOs].”
Logistically, Zirkle said the audit has been a challenge. He said the University’s policy of allowing students plenty of freedom to self-govern is generally beneficial to Student Council, but that it also means there’s little oversight or record-keeping.
“There is very little administrative oversight or involvement with the SAF,” he said. “There’s just not the institutional memory I think is necessary.”
Zirkle has worked with business services to gather the data on CIO spending from the past 10 years. Every organization is designated a task number, to track their spending and other information, but beyond that they’re not clearly categorized.
Zirkle said some clubs are grouped into “projects,” which are broad categories of organizations. Groups such as club sports and Madison House are also each designated as their own projects.
“And then everything else is ‘other clubs,’ which is quite a lot, especially when you have cultural organizations in there next to academic organizations,” he said. “That doesn’t help us a lot especially in terms of supporting these organizations.”
The uncategorized “other clubs” include approximately 350 CIOs — some of which are still active and others defunct, Zirkle said.
The next step, he said, will be putting those miscellaneous clubs into their relevant categories in order to gain more useful insights from the data.
“We have the go-ahead from business services to reshape these categories,” Zirkle said.
He plans to analyze trends from different categories of CIOs to learn how Student Council can better support them, and also to study the different types of expenditures listed.
“We could look at spending on lodging, how much is being spent on travel, how much is being spent on equipment,” he said. “I think that’ll add a different dimension to it that’s very important. It’ll help us see, in theory, how much money is going away from Grounds, how much is staying on Grounds.”
Once this analysis is complete, Zirkle plans to reach out for student input on the data, primarily through the aforementioned CIO Census. Since all students pay into the SAF, he said it’s important for students to have a say in where that money goes.
“[The census] will be unbiased, but it’ll get at the root of these questions, to find out where student sentiment is at and how it lines up with our spending,” Zirkle said.
That step of the process is still a ways off, though. Zirkle said his goal is to have the census out early in the spring semester of 2018.
Though the results of the audit remain to be seen, Zirkle emphasized that no organizations will be receiving major cuts or any sort of massive overhaul — instead, he said Student Council will work with whatever organizations or University partners necessary to improve the support system for CIOs.
“This is for the future, and making sure that future Student Councils are better equipped to handle the varied challenges that face students every single year,” Cintron said.
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