The Student Services Finance Committee voted to eliminate salaries for Grant Allocation Committee members while granting Associated Students of Madison the rest of their requested $1,272,839.70 budget in its meeting Monday night.
Much of the meeting revolved around eliminating funding for GAC. Under the new budget, only the chair and vice chair will remain salaried positions. This is the first year GAC representatives were salaried ASM members.
“It is an inappropriate use of student funds; we’re paying people to be mildly involved in ASM,” Rep. Jon Kim said.
The dissension within the committee continued with comparing the work done by SSFC and GAC. Although GAC is the only committee within ASM that is funded, some representatives feel their work is no more outstanding or time consuming than that done by other branches of ASM.
“One of the things that worries me about unfunding this position is that it does make SSFC seem like a superior body to the Grand Allocation Committee,” said Rep. Cooper Beckwith.
SSFC Vice Chair Zaakir Abdul-wahid expressed concerns that taking away salaries for any committee representative would limit students’ access to committee membership, thus limiting a body’s collective perspective.
“Having only people who are privileged enough not to work is a more dangerous trajectory for student council as a whole,” Abdul-wahid said.
SSFC Chair Jeremy Swanson transferred his role as committee leader to Vice Chair Abdul-wahid in order to participate in the discussion and offer his support for the decision to strip GAC’s funding.
“In Student Council I will aggressively defend the decision we made tonight,” Swanson said.
SSFC also voted to grant the Student Leadership Program their requested $53,370.53 budget for the 2020 fiscal year.
