The Student Association meeting was abuzz Monday night, not with debate, but rather with the buzzing of a broken speaker in Maxwell Auditorium.

The problem forced the meeting to be moved into another room in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, where SA discussed its budget request.

SA passed a bill requesting a budget of $60,500 for the 2003-2004 year.

The budget included $12,000 for office supplies, $8,000 in stipends, $4,500 in maintenance fees, $2,000 for computing and media services, $10,000 for phone service, $1,300 for advertising, $4,000 for shuttle buses, $2,000 for co-sponsorship and $5,000 for the SA banquet.

The budget will be an increase of about $6,000 from last year’s SA budget, said SA President Andrew Thomson.

“A lot of it will go to office supplies but also to help student organizations,” said Thomson, a junior information management and political science major. “It helps with our ability to help student groups by posting bulletin boards and their fliers on the bulletin board instead of having to go through the process of gaining permission to post and depending on the RAs to post them.”

The budget was amended once with a $1,500 increase in the advertising budget from the proposed $11,500 to $13,000 during the meeting. Junior marketing major Dominick Chillemi disapproved the increase, as it would take money away from student organizations.

“That is $1,500 another organization doesn’t get, and I think we should consider that with a moment of silence,” Chillemi said.

Former SA President Colin Seale suggested that some of the money directed at office supplies, such as the cost of photocopying that is currently done in the SA office, could potentially be covered by the student organizations themselves as part of the increased student fee.

Thomson said Comptroller Erin Maghran is currently in talks with the Campus Copy Center in the Marshall Square Mall, trying to work out a deal where student organizations will have a quota of copies they can make at the center.

SA’s budget will now be reviewed by the finance board, along with the budget requests of all other student organizations, Thomson said. The finance board will then send SA the reviewed budgets and those will then need to be approved by SA, he said.

In other SA news:

n Leslie Robinson, a sophomore in the School of Management, was elected as the newest member of the finance board for SA.

n SA Vice President Rigaud Noel announced that about 500 students have used the Armory Square shuttle the last three weekends the shuttle has run.

n SA unanimously passed a bill approving a vision, which sets the framework the finance board uses when determining how funds should be allocated. The bill states organizations may not exceed 33 percent of their budget on operating costs, 62 percent of their budget on programming expenses and 8 percent of their budget on advertising.

Published on March 24, 2003 at 12:00 pm