Student Government Association passes budgets; announces funding rollovers for next year

The UW-Superior Student Government Association (SGA) unanimously passed the final student org funding numbers for the 2020-21 school year. The final budgets were emailed to student leaders earlier this week, and a complete listing can be found below. 

Additionally, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, SGA unanimously voted to pass legislation that would enable student organizations to keep a portion of their 2019-20 budget into the next school year.

Under normal circumstances, an organization’s entire budget would be swept back into the unallocated segregated fee fund. However, under the new legislation, only 75% of an organization’s budget will be swept. The sweep is expected to collect around $52,000. 

This final decision was made due to several organizations reaching out about their plans to host previously planned spring semester events in the upcoming fall semester. The original proposal put forward by the Segregated University Allocation Fee Committee (SUFAC) involved a 50% sweep, however, after some deliberation, SUFAC settled on a 75% sweep. “We may have to give some orgs a few dollars extra for emergency funding [for events planned at the end of the fiscal year]. That might have to be done through an executive order,” said SUFAC Chair Sajid Chowdhury.

The 75% sweep was decided upon in order to reduce the potential overall cut across the board on student organization budgets while still enabling SUFAC to have a sizeable emergency funding budget. Due to uncertainty about segregated fee allocations next year due to COVID-19, SUFAC optioned to play it safe in their legislation to ensure that organizations would receive their requested funding while still maintaining an emergency fund allocation balance. 

The last several academic years have seen cuts upwards of 20% by SUFAC on the final budget allocations. “Due to the COVID-19 situation, we are unsure as to what the total allocation will be during the next fiscal year as the seg fees collected may be affected by student enrollment and retainment. Therefore, it is hard to predict whether there will be an across the board cut later on,” said SUFAC Chair Sajid Chowdhury.