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SGA to change line item funding policy for sports

The Student Government Association (SGA) has recently been renovating the system by which club sports are receiving funding. The current system grants Director of Campus Recreation John Maurizi a predetermined amount of money determined by historical need, which he then distributes, whereas the new system will be more heavily regulated by the SGA.

Line funding is a system by which the SGA assigns money out of the Student Activity Fund (SAF) to a group of organizations based on historical data. Club sports received a total of $72,000 for this fall semester, which was then distributed to partially cover costs for needed expenses such as buses, equipment, and coaches. The portion of the funds that is not covered by line item funding from the SGA is funded by members through their membership fees.

According to E.J. Hannah, who is spearheading the project along with Elena Malova and Mark Krupinski, “At the start of this year, this committee set out to pursue transparency and gain understanding in how significant each line item of the SGA is. Around this same time, John Maurizi, head of Campus Recreation, reached out to us with a concern of how much funding was going towards club sports. As we came to the club sports line item, it became evident that the current system struggled to provide transparency, as well as fairly and consistently regulate funds between each sport.”

Future SGA policy will revolve around the distribution of funds to clubs in relation to what portion of the funding comes from line item funding and what portion comes from membership fees.

In a meeting with club sports presidents on Tuesday, October 28, Malova and Hannah explored options for the new system. The meeting made progress in determining early values for these figures, as well as allowing people to raise concerns and ideas about the policy as it is being developed. There are currently no actual figures for what portion of the funding will be coming from what source, as the policy is still under development.

The policymakers hope to continue to work with club sports presidents as they make progress in order to ensure that the transition is a safe and stable one for the organizations involved. “We’ve started to receive numbers from club sports teams and are playing around with them to ensure that the arbitrary percentages we threw around won’t put us in the red relative to the current system.”

For emergency funding, club sports can apply for additional funding throughout the semester in the same way that other Registered Student Organizations (RSOs) would. Sports teams will also have to apply for DuckLink registration, and will be able to manage their budget through the website. The DuckLink organization page will allow teams to see their previous budgets, request funding, and more. This is to help these organizations have better transparency with regard to their funding by making these statistics easily accessible to the SGA.

According to Hannah, “Having club sports operate through DuckLink assures unity. We want the platform to be a one stop shop for everything related to student clubs and organizations. It would make tracking student engagement simpler with the ability to track rosters. On top of that, DuckLink can be used for mass communication with the team and store forms that the teams need to complete for legalities.”

However, some aspects of funding policy will remain unchanged. P-card usage for teams will remain the same. This is because the P-card has a certain limit imposed on it by the bank handling these transactions, something that the SGA has no control over. Like in previous years, additional funds will be rolled back in order to prevent additional unnecessary spending. Payment plans for items such as buses and coaches needed by these organizations will also remain unchanged by this policy.

This policy change has not yet been approved by the SGA, but will be voted on by the Senate when the policy is completed.

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