SGA held an emergency meeting Thursday night after the Student Finance Board (SFB)'s 2003-04 budget request approval was tabled at its meeting Wednesday.
Due to the lengthy discussions surrounding SGA impeachments, SFB members were unable to start their presentation until nearly the end of the normal Wednesday meeting. Their resolution, along with the rest of the meeting, was tabled by a role call vote of 16-14-0.
Before the agenda was finally tabled, SFB requested a recount of the vote. Janelle Williams, SFB assistant chair, said that they were under time constraints to get the budget approved and they did not want to postpone the vote.
At the Thursday meeting in Norsworthy lounge, the first motion was to open the discussion to approve the SFB budget. After lengthy deliberation, the resolution for the proposed budget passed by a role call vote of 28-5-2.
Jesse Place, speaker of the senate, urged members not to approve the budget because many organizations have said they were unhappy with their budgets. He said, "This warrants us to look into it more."
Ren?e Marchioni, SFB chairperson, said that in order for SGA members to have more information than just the conclusions, they would have had to be working with them the whole year and would have attended the budget retreat where most of the budget was decided.
She also reminded members that the reason SGA and SFB are separate is to have a "check and balance system," and that SGA and SFB should trust each other since both organizations are working together for the students.
Mike Cilia, vice president of administration and finance, had the advantage of being a member of both organizations and told SGA members, "(SFB) has done our job."
Cilia explained that the responsibility of SFB is to decide the appropriate budget for each organization and to determine which organizations would be best deserving of any additional funds based on what they have done with their budgets in the past and what they plan to do for the upcoming year. SGA members debated whether the budgets appropriated for each organization were fair. Members wanted to know the amount that organizations received as compared to the amount they asked for.
By a vote of 29-2-0, the discussion was then called to question. This means that all discussions were closed, there would be no further questions and the final vote would be taken.
After the resolution passed, Portera thanked all SFB members for attending, and also apologized for the hassle, since a debate like that had never happened before.
