By Katie Aurand
Staff Writer

As student leaders prepare their budgets to present to Senate this weekend, they know they will not get the full amount they request. Patrick Satchell, industrial engineering senior and chairperson of the Senate Finance Committee, said that average request numbers cannot be calculated due to the extreme variability in the organizations’ planning and also the “padding” of requests that occurs on occasion.

The Student Organization Appropriations Process, also known as SOAP, is the method by which Student Senate decides how much money each student organization gets each year. The funds come from the general student activity fee that students pay as part of their tuition. In Fiscal Year ‘11, which is the operating budget that the organizations are currently operating under for this academic year, Senate allocated a total of $148,260.40 from all contributing sources, while the requested amounts totaled $266,464.46.

For FY11, the largest allocation to a single organization was $18,600 to Formula SAE and the lowest was $212.50 to Phi Eta Sigma.

“There is considerable variability between organizations with different foci,” said Satchell. “For example, Competition teams’ budgets create statistics considerably different from Academic organizations.”

Of the six organizations that received over $5,000 each in funding, five of them were CAMP competition teams. The other organization was the M-Week committee. In fact, of the 15 organizations that received over $3,000 each for this year’s operating budget, nine of them were CAMP teams. Only one CAMP team, the Steel Bridge Team, received much less than $3,000.

Satchell said that funding decisions are made based upon several criteria stated in Senate’s Constitution.

“Each year there is a substantial amount of debate that occurs within the Committee after the presentations are made – taking into account the application, presentation, and other factors germane to discussion,” said Satchell. “Following the debate, a mathematical process is used to calculate the ‘ideal’ funding the Committee feels is appropriate for each organization.  Unfortunately, because we cannot fully fund the ideal state, we then fit our recommendations to the funds available.”

To read more about student organization financial allotment breakdown, look for the upcoming series of articles on www.sdsmtaurum.com.