Student Association is expected to vote Monday night on a bill that would restrict the use of rollover funds after several SA members criticized the planning and funding of the “Cuse Can! It Starts With Us” event.

SA’s current bylaws require the president, vice president and comptroller to vote on the use of rollover funds, which is money left over from the previous academic year. Funds accumulate in the rollover account as student organizations return money to SA if events are cancelled or the cost is overestimated.

Events or initiatives funded through rollover are not currently required to follow SA’s finance codes. The proposed bill would give the organization’s Finance Board the final say on rollover spending as an effort to prevent an abuse of the funds. Several SA representatives said at an assembly meeting on April 1 that the bill was too restrictive.

Stacy Omosa, a member of SA’s Finance Board and comptroller candidate, presented the bill with Parliamentarian Drew Jacobsen at the April 1 meeting.

SA President Ghufran Salih, Vice President Kyle Rosenblum and Comptroller Ambrose Gonzalez made the decision to spend $242,000 of SA’s rollover funds on “Cuse Can!” Comedian Tiffany Haddish and rappers Pusha T and Flipp Dinero performed in Goldstein Auditorium on Saturday.

Susie Teuscher | Digital Design Editor

As part of her campaign, Omosa proposed redistributing 60% of the rollover funding back to the Finance Board so that it can be allocated to registered student organizations. The Finance Board allocates between $3 to $4 million from student activity fees to RSOs every year, she said.

Gonzalez, SA’s comptroller, said in a text message that the rollover account for the current academic year had approximately $300,000 before “Cuse Can!” Gonzalez said he, Salih and Rosenblum have spent rollover funds on initiatives like ASL interpreters.

“We use that to fund campus wide initiatives that benefit the student population,” Gonzalez said. “We don’t typically give back funds to the finance board since that’s not how the process goes.”

James Franco and Angie Pati — SA president and vice president for the 2017-18 academic year — used rollover money to fund “Cuse For Good: Social Justice,” which brought actor Yara Shahidi and Joey Bada$$ to campus in spring 2018. Franco and Pati also spent rollover funds on disaster relief trips to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, ticket giveaways for basketball and football games and free STI testing.

“This money is designed to be spent because you don’t want rollover to be built up,” Franco said. “Students pay into that with their student fee … You want use that money as it comes in.”

Susie Teuscher | Digital Design Editor

SA had about $400,000 in rollover funding during the 2017-18 academic year and gave $100,000 back to the Finance Board, Franco said. Rollover can vary greatly from year to year — during the 2016-17 academic year, SA only had $40,000 in rollover, he said.

Rollover is a new process that is open to reform, Franco and Pati said. After the planning of “Cuse For Good,” the Assembly passed a bill requiring that the comptroller be included in rollover spending decisions.

“(SA) may have had rollover funding, but it did not go through me, and thus, nothing was ever funded via rollover money,” Aysha Seedat, SA president during the 2015-16 academic year, said in an email.

Campus-wide student organizations are allocated funds for the following academic year in the spring — before the new SA president, vice president and comptroller are elected, Franco said. This means the previous SA administration sets the budget for the next one.

Franco said lax rules on rollover allow SA’s president and vice president to fund initiatives that they otherwise would not be able to support.

The Office of Student Activities oversees SA’s budget and advises SA leaders about spending, including rollover spending. Greg Bronk, a budget analyst in the office who works closely with SA, was not made available for an interview.

Franco and Pati said OSA has the final say in the budgetary process and would reject “egregious spending,” like a yacht.

“It’s been framed as this magic pot of money that Student Association leaders get access to, but there’s definitely a lot of conversation around it,” Franco said.

Published on April 7, 2019 at 10:23 pm

Contact Casey: casey@dailyorange.com | @caseydarnell_