SGB Releases Financial Info for Groups

Student Governing Board’s release of financial figures on Saturday brought what many hope will kick off a period of greater transparency and solve what many have pointed to as a long-standing concern.

The report was released on the heels of the Activities Board at Columbia’s mid-February decision to publish its student group allocations. The report itself, which can be found on the SGB’s Web site, includes the expenses and expense type of the more than 100 student groups that fall under the SGB, and distinguishes between the different time frames of funding.

SGB Chair Jonathan Siegel, CC ’08, said that the announcement reflects a commitment to more precision in its budgetary reports as well as to students, whose money composes the bulk of finances that Funding at Columbia University distributes to the four class councils.

“We think everyone should release their budgets, as much as possible, and going forward, there should be as much transparency as possible,” Siegel said, adding that although the SGB would like all boards and class councils to take similar steps, the factor of detail—for example, the SGB’s budget report discloses the governing board’s own expenses, such as $29.60 spent on 11 clipboards—acts as an extra measure of accountability to the student body.

So far, the Engineering Student Council, the General Studies Student Council, the Student Government Association, and the ABC have made their budgets public, yet none of the documents match the intricacy of the SGB’s. The Columbia College Student Council has not released its budget.

“Since the allocations are coming out of student pockets, we owe it to our constituency to be accountable for how the allocations are spent,” said Arjun Kapoor, SGB treasurer and CC ’09, of the board’s ultimate responsibility to students, which played a major ideological role in the development.

Yet the SGB expressed other motivations for announcing its figures.

Siegel said that Funding at Columbia University allots less money to SGB than it does to other boards, and reasoned that more detailed reports allow greater opportunity to find inequities in funding. According to Siegel’s PowerPoint presentation, the ABC acquires 43 percent more than SGB per funded student group, and Community Impact receives 45 percent more.

In his defense of the way that this recent act will help to combat the inequality, Siegel remarked, “If you say, ‘we spent this much money on food for this event,’ then someone can look at that say, ‘I’m a constituent and this is ultimately my money. I take an issue with that.’”

The SGB’s initiative may be the first time such efforts materialized, but the subjects on which it sheds light have been debated for years. Whereas some believe that the ABC and the SGB diverge in their interests and thus also in their financial needs, others side with the opinion that the SGB has been mistreated.

“You have to compromise and economize as an under-funded SGB group,” Kapoor said. Having prior experience as a treasurer of a group under the SGB, he said that the club “had to work hard to get co-sponsors. It ends up being a lot of work and a lot of bureaucracy.”

Paula Cheng, president of the ABC and CC ’08, said that her organization does not recognize the existence of a rivalry between the ABC and SGB. “This kind of ABC-SGB divide doesn’t make sense because we’re all part of the same community,” said Cheng, who also supports the idea of transparency. But the SGB says it has faced difficulties in the past that ABC has not, as while both have dealt with budget cuts, the net effect on the SGB was ultimately more drastic.

CCSC President Michelle Diamond, CC ’08, sees a distinction in the intrinsic natures of the SGB and the ABC, although she acknowledges that the SGB was subject to harsher circumstances in the past. Diamond noted the council intended earlier in the year to publish its finances, but that due to a number of factors including the sheer size of the budget, the matter has fallen lower on the list of priorities.

In the eyes of the class councils, “the SGB has been an enigma and somewhat unfamiliar,” Kapoor said. In order to enable the councils to re-evaluate how they make their funding decisions, he said, other boards will have to take the lead.

David Xia contributed reporting to this article.

scott.levi@columbiaspectator.com