Stacy Omosa and Eduardo Gomez, the two candidates for the upcoming Student Association comptroller election, share a common theme in their separate campaigns: using the position of comptroller to help student organizations across campus.

Both Gomez, a junior sociology major, and Omosa, a junior political science major, currently serve on SA’s Finance Board. The board, which the comptroller oversees, is in charge of allocating funding to registered student organizations.

One of Gomez’s goals is to make the Finance Board and comptroller position more accessible to students, he said. Gomez said he wants to make sure that students know the board is a resource they can reach out to.

“I feel like there are many times where I talked to students throughout the campus, and they don’t even know what the Student Association is, and that’s an issue,” Gomez said.

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Gomez’s campaign has three main platforms: integrity, support and camaraderie. The integrity aspect, he said in an email, includes ensuring unbiased Finance Board decisions, distributing student funds justly and valuing registered student organizations’ needs equally.

In the area of support, Gomez is focusing on making time for individual concerns, connecting the Finance Board with SA to build transparency and increasing the board’s accessibility. Gomez said he would also advocate for marginalized communities and give RSOs resources to plan events.

“I want to just make sure that we are enforcing a united environment, and just that everyone is building camaraderie and just respect for each other,” Gomez said.

Omosa, the other candidate for comptroller, said a key part of her campaign is the creation of Finance Board advisers for RSOs. Under Omosa’s plan, each of the 12 Finance Board members would be assigned to at least 10 or 20 organizations to provide support and answer questions relating to the budget process.

She also said she would like to put rollover funds back into the hands of the Finance Board and under the finance codes. Currently, rollover spending, which comes from unused money from the previous academic year, only needs approval from the president, vice president and comptroller to be used.

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A majority of the rollover spending would be put toward student organization allocation and programming, as well as toward subsidizing some Student Centers and Programming Services rooms so that groups can use them for free, Omosa said. Changing the way rollover is controlled would give more money to serve the different interests of RSOs, she said.

“This a diverse institution in the sense that we have varying interests,” Omosa said. “People that cater to different causes, different ethnicities, sexualities, different groups on campus.”

For transparency, Omosa said she wants to send weekly emails to RSOs with funding amounts to let them know how much money is allocated to student organizations and how much is left to be allocated. Omosa said she also wants to create cheat sheets for organizations applying for funding so they have a better understanding of what could get their event budgets denied.

Gomez said the position of comptroller is important to him because he wants to inspire others. He said he felt like he was never expected to be at a school like SU and that he wants to motivate and inspire others who may feel that same way.

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Omosa said there has not been much focus on the position of comptroller, despite the fact that the comptroller is in charge of about $4 million dollars a year plus rollover funds. Organizations are directly affected by the amount of money they are allocated by the comptroller and the Finance Board, she said.

“The comptroller really shapes the culture of Syracuse University,” Omosa said. “They shape the type of events we have here.”

Omosa’s qualifications for the position include her time spent interning for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, she said in a text message. She is also the fiscal agent for the African Student Union.

Gomez said he has experience in finance through his internships at the Eisenstat Capital Partners hedge fund, the brokerage firm Redburn and at Morgan Stanley, an investment bank and financial services company.

Published on April 3, 2019 at 10:48 pm

Contact India: irmiragl@syr.edu