Student Association members grappled Monday over who will monitor the spending of a campus activist group, but the ultimate decision will rest in the hands of the student body.

The SA assembly passed two bills laying the groundwork for the upcoming referendum on the Syracuse University and State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry chapter of the New York Public Interest Research Group. The bills, both of which drew stiff resistance from NYPIRG representatives and some assembly members, are an attempt to make NYPIRG accountable to SA for the way it spends student activity fee money, SA officials said.

‘It’s providing for even more fiscal responsibility and accordance with [SA] codes,’ SA President Drew Lederman said after the bills’ passing.

NYPIRG is currently funded by a special fee, $3 per student per semester, additional to the regular student activity fee. Students are allowed to exempt themselves from the fee and SA is under contract to hold a campus-wide referendum on the fee every four years.

The first bill laid out the wording of the first referendum question, asking students, ‘should NYPIRG be exempt from the regular budget process and receive direct funding?’ Students who vote yes support funding the group directly at the current level, while those who vote no are opting for NYPIRG to be ‘treated as any other registered student organization’, the bill states. The group would still be able to request regular student activity fee funding, the bill adds.

The second bill posed a second referendum question, addressing the possibility that NYPIRG would request student activity fee money, should the first question fail to pass. Saying that the student activity fee would be ‘hard-pressed to support NYPIRG as an additional yearly operating student organization’, the bill would increase the fee from $133 per student to $139, the same amount currently paid by students with the NYPIRG fee still in effect.

The voting on the referendum is tentatively scheduled for Feb. 9, said Jessie Cordova, chairwoman of SA’s Board of Elections and Membership.

Top SA officials criticized NYPIRG for a lack of transparency in the way it spends student fee funds. Although the group recently submitted a breakdown of expenses to SA, the report did not separate student fee money from other funds, Comptroller Maggie Misztal said.

‘We have no idea where it goes or what it’s there for,’ she said.

The referendum, however, is not an attempt to take away NYPIRG’s funding, Misztal said. Although there are certain items currently in the group’s budget that cannot be funded by student fee money, Misztal said she would personally sponsor a bill to give NYPIRG its own annual operating budget.

‘The issue is not how much money they’re getting, it’s what they’re doing with their money,’ Misztal said.

Some NYPIRG members were outraged by the way the referendum bills were handled in the assembly. Sean Vormwald, project coordinator for the SU and SUNY ESF chapter, felt that the referendum’s wording failed to note that the referendum process has been the established method of funding for the group.

‘We’ve been doing this for 30 years,’ Vormwald said.

Vormwald took issue with the procedural handling of the bills as well, claiming that Lederman failed to recognize NYPIRG members in the gallery who wanted to speak on the bill. Non-voting members cannot be recognized during debate on a bill according to Robert’s Rules of Order, Lederman said.

Vormwald also challenged the final vote on the bills, saying that a voice vote alone did not adequately count the two-thirds majority required by SA codes to pass referendum bills. It is not customary to take a standing counting of yea’s and nay’s unless an assembly member calls for it, Lederman responded.

Published on February 2, 2004 at 12:00 pm