By Nick Statt
The Student Activities Board (SAB), the event-coordinating wing of the Undergraduate Student Government (USG), has received an additional $130,887, a 32.4 percent increase over last year, while the club budgets have been cut by $208,062, an 18.3 percent decrease from last year’s final budget. Nearly 70 percent of all clubs saw a cut in their budgets and SAB now has $534,887 to spend on campus events.
USG officers saw immense promise in SAB throughout the last two semesters, which was the organization’s first year after the controversial 2010 Establishment of Student Life Act that restructured SAB and put former USG Treasurer Moiz Khan in charge of event planning.
“They successfully put on big programs clearly demonstrated by Aziz [Ansari], Best Coast and obviously Bruno Mars,” said current USG Treasurer Thomas Kirnbauer, who drafted the budget alongside last year’s treasurer Jackie Mark and a six-person budget committee. “We want to keep the status quo because we feel that SAB has done a pretty good job,” he added.
“If you give them $1,000, that doesn’t help them. This money will help them go,” Kirnbauer said. The additional money SAB has received is aimed at supporting a Fall event as large as Bruno Mars, but on the Staller steps.
USG’s 2011/12 Original Budget, released on sbusg.org on June 1, is provisional and will be change after budget revisions this Fall, which any club can apply for.
This process, called Fall revisions, takes rollover money from the previous year’s club budget that wasn’t spent and appropriates it to clubs that apply for additional money. With the Clubs and Organizations’ Original 2010/11 Budget at $929,053, many clubs will be awaiting the chance to apply for a budget revision and Kirnbauer estimates that that figure will rise back up to seven figures, where it was last year in both the final and original budgets of 2010/11.
“We are pretty confident that our Fall revisions will mend any wounds that occurred,” Kirnbauer said. While USG officers are stressing that one must compare original budgets to get a better sense of the change, the Clubs and Organizations’ budget still decreased by $175, 771, or 16.2 percent, from last year’s original budget and eventually received only an additional $32,290 to their roughly $1.1 million budget, a 2.9 percent increase, after Fall revisions.
It must also be noted that a percentage of the decrease in club budgets is due to the removal of the individual Residence Halls from the overall Clubs and Organizations budget, which accounted for $38,000 of both the original and final budgets of last year. Those line items were merged into one budget that can be found under USG Agencies, Services, and Organizations under the Residence Hall Association. The revised decrease in the new budget for Clubs and Organizations, with the removal of the Residence Halls budgets, would be 15.5 percent if comparing to the Final 2010/11 budget and 13 percent if comparing to the Original 2010/11 budget.
This year’s budget contains another point of interest concerning SAB. The spreadsheet indicates that SAB’s Original 2010/11 budget was $270,000 and that it received an increase of $134,000 when the budget was finalized in the Fall. That would equate to a 98 percent increase in its budget if one compared only original budgets from 2010/11 to 2011/12.
Kirnbauer says that those numbers represent a lapse in the spreadsheet and that the new, restructured SAB was never put through the budget process in the Spring of 2010; rather it was given the full $404,000 in the Fall using leftover money in USG’s budget. “It’s probably just how much they allocated to the old SAB,” he explained. “When I was in the Senate, there was an appropriations bill for $404,000. The previous treasurer who did that spreadsheet just might have put it that way.” Former Treasurer Jackie Mark could not be reached for comment on the topic of SAB’s line structure in the budget.
USG President Mark Maloof has yet to replace Moiz Khan, this past year’s Student Programming Agency director who runs SAB alongside the VP of Student Life. With no SPA director, the organization is in the hands of Deron Hill, USG’s current VP of Student Life, with Kirnbauer acting as SAB’s treasurer and VP of Communications and Public Relations Farjad Fazli as secretary. Not only does that put SAB’s leadership in question, but it clouds the future of the now half-million dollar organization’s efficiency, considering that it went over budget last year.
“The reason why SAB goes over budget is the end of the year concert,” Kirnbauer explained. “I’ve had a lot of discussions with Administration with what we can do better in the future and I think the big problem was that we really had one person in SAB kind of running the show,” he added, referencing Khan’s assumption of responsibilities as SPA Director. Kirnbauer said that Maloof is looking for an SPA Director who is fiscally responsible, “…but we really need to stick to a process,” he added.
Kirnabuer will be releasing SAB’s full 2010/11 spending history on sbusg.org later this month, thereby making the activities of one of Stony Brook’s fastest growing, and controversial, pillars of campus life fully transparent.
Nick Statt
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“The reason why SAB goes over budget is the end of the year concert,” Kirnbauer explained. “I’ve had a lot of discussions with Administration with what we can do better in the future and I think the big problem was that we really had one person in SAB kind of running the show,” he added, referencing Khan’s assumption of responsibilities as SPA Director. Kirnbauer said that Maloof is looking for an SPA Director who is fiscally responsible, “…but we really need to stick to a process,” he added.
That one person was NOT supposed to be “running the show” and nobody “stuck to the process” or followed policies and procedures.
Approval between Campus and Promoter
The Administrative Director of USG or Assistant Director and the Promoter of the event must agree adequate funding is available to cover the event expenses. They will review budget and timeline items. The approval must take place prior to contract signing, and at least 6 weeks prior to event. Pending the funding source, if organization is USG funded then it would need to go through the USG Administrative Director. If organization is not funded then they must see their Program Advisor for an initial meeting to go over the funding source for the event.
http://studentaffairs.stonybrook.edu/forpolicies/policies/event.shtml
So where was the oversight of the USG Administrative Director when SAB overspent its budget?
“Kirnabuer will be releasing SAB’s full 2010/11 spending history on sbusg.org later this month”- The month is over, what damage did SAB/Khan do?
True to his word Thomas Kirnbauer released his statement along with the expenditures of SAB’s “financial situation” on USG’s website (sbusg.org) on 8/26/11. As “Speculated” this statement only confirms how those involved in coordinating the End of Year Concert circumvented the USG Treasurers Office, Accounting Office, and Administrative Director, by leaving them with the “impression That SAB was within its budget.”
http://sbusg.org/files/2011/08/SAB-Official-Statement.pdf
Spring 2011 Concert Expenses:
http://sbusg.org/files/2011/08/Spring-2011-Concert-Expenses-Sheet.pdf
How does this happen, when there are internal controls and policies and procedures in place that apply to everyone doing an event on this campus?
The USG Treasurer refers to a change in the policy which restructured SAB to make it more streamlined and efficient. The “efficient” part obviously failed, and this policy is flawed if SAB was able to overspend student funds by $40,060.65.
2010 ESTABLISHMENT OF STUDENT LIFE ACT
http://sbusg.org/files/2010/05/2010-Establishment-of-Student-Life-Act.pdf
The Senate finds that—
1. Student life for UNDERGRADUATE students on the campus of Stony Brook University is lacking;
2. There exists no centralized planning organization that can efficiently coordinate large events for the entire UNDERGRADUATE community;
The UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT ACTIVITY FEE- should accommodate the UNDERGRADUATES who pay that fee and NOT the entire campus community, faculty and staff and the Graduate Students who do not co-sponsor any of these events.
We now know where the rest of SBU-TV’s budget went to.
USG once again fails at transparency and accountability by allowing the individuals who were responsible for successfully manipulating the system to get off with “This action will not be tolerated in the future by the USG and in the event that a circumstance of similar nature is to happen again, further actions will be pursued.”
Allowing SAB to bypass the three gatekeepers who are supposed to approve expenditures, means that someone took it upon oneself to secure services and purchase supplies without the knowledge or consent of the Administrative Director, USG Treasurer and USG Accounting office. This is clearly financial mismanagement and those responsible should be vacated from the position they now hold on USG’s Judiciary.
According to Thomas Kirnbauer’s statement: “This action will NOT be tolerated in the future,” He is saying that USG will let this meager amount of $40,060.65 go unpunished. “Further actions” need to be taken now!
The decision to allocate $534,887.26 to SAB for the Academic Year of 2011-2012 buts more burden on SAB to deliver an extravagant array of entertainment without any financial assistance from the student activities office or any other group on campus. The “SUCCESS” of the events under SAB in 2010-2011 had to do with the fact that SAB “gave away the store.”
If USG wants to throw bigger and better concerts for the “campus Community” it should NOT be at the sole expense of the undergraduate students and they need to follow policies and procedures.
BTW- Wasn’t ALLOCATE supposed to be used by all USG funded clubs and organizations for all expenditures?
According to the USG website :ALLOCATE is an electronic club voucher and EVENT TRACKING system designed to be simple and easy to use.
It didn’t track the event expenses very well when someone in SAB didn’t use it ? Did it? The dog didn’t eat the voucher and no one lost the paperwork.
The statement released by the USG Treasurer, Thomas Kirnbauer, makes it pretty clear that SAB even bypassed ALLOCATE, the “SIMPLE and EASY TO USE” electronic voucher system. The only thing that was “SIMPLE and EASY TO USE” was the money that SAB didn’t have in their budget.
As a matter of fact this is how one of them justifies his actions:
“Missing The Point”- By Moiz Khan Malik
It is not uncommon to come across an article by a student journalist that seems to just, miss the point. When that is coupled with a fairly obvious “liberal” ideology, it is the recipe for a poor argument. Take for example an article that appeared recently in Stony Brook’s self proclaimed progressive news source, THiNK Magazine, “SAB Nabs Half-Million Budget Despite Pattern of Fiscal Mismanagement, Violation of USG Laws.”
The first claim the author makes is that SAB (which I ran the day-to-day operations of) struggled to control spending. This is patently false, as the entire leadership of the organization knew full well that SAB would wind up spending over-budget. In fact, it was tacitly encouraged (and openly acknowledged) by its leading figures. Of course, the author made no attempt to contact the previous regime (including myself), instead sticking to an individual who was, for the most part, out of the loop when it came to the executive branch of the organization. I suppose when the journalist himself has the desire to paint a very specific picture, it is inconvenient to contact individuals who may supply contradictory evidence.
The author continues on to make a very specific claim, about the Upright Citizens Brigade. My response to this claim is, what are your sources? The author points to the figure of $10,000. Such a fact would be alarming if it were true. I advise the author to actually investigate before he reports. The author continues on to make claims about food t-shirts. On food, I simply say, when planning events that have attendance in the thousands, it is better to over-estimate than under-estimate. And since the food was non-perishable, it was used after the event (which thereby led to savings since it was bought in bulk) On the t-shirts point, my response is that they were bought exactly for the purpose of giving away at a convenient time, and whats a more convenient time then when thousands of people are waiting in line?
The author continues to get numbers wrong about how much things cost, (and shockingly they are overestimated). The article makes the accusation that “SAB began pushing checks through the USG accounting office, circumnavigating around the built-in checks meant to catch reckless spending by USG clubs and agencies.” What an absurd statement. How is it the case that an agency can “push checks through” an independent fiscal agent? Circumnavigating built-in checks? Even if this were true, which it is not, it would be a serious accusation about legitimacy of the independent fiscal agent. And what proof does the author provide for this claim? You guessed it, absolutely none.
Harking back to an early point I made, the author interviewed the wrong individuals. In a quote by the current Treasurer, not the Treasurer at the time (who doesn’t quite seem to know how the organization works), Mr. Kirnbauer states that normally expenditures would require Senate approval. This again is completely wrong, only appropriations require Senate approval.
To sum up, the author did very little work to investigate his claims or statements. To make matters worse, he did even less work in terms of attempting to understand what exactly happened, as that would have actually required a bit of real journalism. The fact of the matter is, I was hired on the first day of classes to plan a years worth of events and given a very specific charge (which I happen to agree with) to plan large events for the student body. I made it very clear to everyone who asked that the agency would require more money. It is therefore not a coincidence that very little money was spent in the ’10 Fall Revisions, and that SAB wound up in the red. The indications and warnings were there for everyone who cared, and they were either purposely overlooked or inadvertently overlooked.
http://moiz.org/blog/
If SAB needed more money, then they should have charged something for the events, like Aziz Ansari that were FREE and charged more than $5.00 per student for Bruno Mars.
“The indications and warnings were there for everyone who cared.” So, he assumes no one cared? Why would USG want this person to serve as its Chief Justice? This is clearly someone who will not take any personal responsibity for his part in the fiscal mismanagement of SAB’s budget and his failure to follow procedures.
Did The USG Treasurer get his numbers wrong or did SAB still over spend its budget by $40,060.65? Let’s ask Moiz, he seems to have all the answers!
So who is MISSING THE POINT?