An allotment of funds for Student Association’s formal violated the organization’s codes, but several members have expressed this was the result of a miscommunication.
The use of nearly $4,000 for the March 30 ‘SA Formal’ was brought to light in a letter to the editor from former Comptroller Jeff Rickert, published Tuesday in The Daily Orange.
The money was taken from SA’s operating budget, which was passed in the fall with no allocation for the event. Budgets must be approved for each line item, and the organization does not fund certain expenses such as food, Rickert said in the letter.
Every registered student organization on campus, including SA, is held to the same standards, he said.
‘Students need to know about everything the student government does, and in my opinion, the use of student funds for events like this is, frankly, unacceptable,’ Rickert wrote.
SA President Dylan Lustig said in an email that funding the event through SA’s operating budget was the result of a misunderstanding about the process.
The formal was going to be paid for through SA’s fundraising account, but the group discovered the fund is traditionally used to pay for bus programs, which took place a week before the event.
SA therefore decided to pay for the formal through its operating budget, after its advisers informed Lustig that other administrations had done so in the past, he said.
Lustig said the formal was necessary in order to foster a sense of community among members — something that was neglected by the Casey administration. SA has held events in the past to give back to members, he said.
‘When people joined SA without knowing what they were getting themselves into or were bugged to join, we naturally and unfortunately but expectedly saw a drop in membership,’ Lustig said. ‘The cabinet knew it had to act in order to retain important membership.’
Casey declined to comment.
Rickert said though SA has purchased items such as food in the past to show appreciation for its members, this money had usually come from donations. It was taken out of the fundraising account, which is not subject to the same limitations as the operating budget, and never exceeded a few hundred dollars, he said.
‘We never pulled out $4,000 to have a formal,’ he said. ‘SA is not an organization that does programming by trade, so I don’t even think if they had requested it for the full amount that it would have been funded at all.’
Several members of Lustig’s cabinet, including Comptroller Stephen DeSalvo, voted against funding the event based on the grounds that it was not in line with the SA codes.
He said in an email that no members of SA were aware that the fundraising account could not be utilized in this way during the planning process. This would have likely caused the organization to pursue other options or cancel the event.
In the future, DeSalvo said SA should look to create an additional account they can draw on for its own use. This would be made up of funds the organization raises itself — not the student activity fee.
Other student groups have committed violations in the past, and although they are never acceptable, this situation was not one particular member’s fault, he said.
Said DeSalvo: ‘We should not point at any one single person in this situation, and should move forward to ensure the opportunity for this to happen never comes about again.’
dmsegelb@syr.edu