The Finance Board met twice this weekend to finalize recommendations on the 20 finance proposals for student organizations that failed before the Student Association assembly last semester.

The board met under closed sessions Friday afternoon and Sunday morning. The presentation of the bills will be Wednesday, Feb. 9, instead of Monday at the SA general assembly meeting. The date of the meeting was changed after an initiative by SA president Travis Mason due to the scheduling of the Syracuse University men’s basketball game.

‘We were taking the first two weeks to get the SA back together,’ said Andrew Urankar, SA comptroller. ‘The whole SA was filling in new members. It was a big transition time.’

Since deliberations concluded this weekend, student groups that had events scheduled for January or February will not receive funding because it is too late to plan them.

‘I imagine there are going to be some student organizations that will be affected by our timeline,’ Urankar said.

Mason said he thinks that situation is ‘horrible.’

‘It speaks to a larger issue of our timetable,’ he said. ‘It needs to be revamped.’

Billy Kim, president of the Korean American Student Association, said their organization has already had to cancel several events and is now trying to reconstruct their calendar.

‘We’re really limited in what we can do,’ Kim said. ‘We have no financial support.’

Kim also said KASA is being forced to collaborate with the Asian Students in America in order to still have the culture show they planned.

‘They assume that since we’re all from the same continent they can lump as all together,’ he said.

Urankar said groups who are being denied funding can request special programming and have events later on in the semester.

‘We don’t get a second chance to go back and change things. It’s better to take the time to get it right,’ Urankar said. ‘Our responsibility was to get it right and not rush things. If waiting an extra week means an event couldn’t happen, then that’s unfortunate.’

Maggie Mistzal, former finance board comptroller, said the student organizations whose bills were rejected likely feel at a loss from the beginning.

‘It puts them at an unfair disadvantage,’ she said. ‘There was no hope for them from the start.’

Darius Pakrooh, a finance board member, said the entire process is taking so long due to the delay from the charges brought on Mistzal last semester, which were based on alleged biased handling of budget allocations to student groups.

‘We’re trying to stay on target and on schedule,’ Pakrooh said.

Mason said he recognized initially that there were not enough members to hold the finance board deliberations due to former members resigning and going abroad

‘I still believe we could have moved a little faster,’ Mason said. ‘This is an extremely important issue.’

Mistzal said while it may seem like it has taken a long time for the next round of deliberations to occur, the finance board could not meet until after the first SA general assembly meeting of the session.

‘I completely understand why it happened,’ Mistzal said.

In addition to the timetable of events, a major issue surrounding the finance board deliberations is the closure of these discussions to the public.

Urankar said finance board meetings close to the public depending on the importance and sensitivity of the discussion, and closure may or may not affect the quality of the deliberations.

‘We also have to speak more candidly,’ Urankar said. ‘We have to do that in a safe environment where everyone can say what they need to say.’

Urankar said any finance board member can propose to close the meeting and a four-fifths majority vote is needed to close.

After Friday’s meeting, Urankar said a member of the board approached him requesting a vote to also close Sunday’s meeting because the member felt uncomfortable with a non-finance board member’s presence in the room.

‘The members are ultimately making the decisions,’ Urankar said. ‘They need to feel comfortable.’

Pakrooh said he was fine with closing the meetings because he did not want to see anything the board said get misinterpreted.

‘If something we said gets misrepresented and then transmitted in (The Daily Orange), the wrong vibe could be given off,’ he said.

Mason said the power to close a meeting should only be used in a situation where the decisions being made are influenced by those non-finance board members present in the room.

‘I am the biggest person on transparency,’ Mason said. ‘When we close the meetings we close ourselves off to the people we’re accountable too.’

Mason said if the board was comprised of the right members who knew how to word their statements, the meetings wouldn’t need to be closed.

Mason and Vice President Eric Crites hold ex-officio seats on the finance board, meaning that while they do not have voting power, they can still attend the meetings when they are closed to the public.

‘I think when the meetings are open it leaves more potential for the finance board to be swayed. It slows down the process tremendously,’ Mistzal said. ‘I think it’s in objectivity’s best interest for finance board deliberations to be closed.’

Not only did the finance board meetings close to the public, they started late due to the absence of some of the members.

‘It’s unfair. It wastes the people’s time who are on time,’ Mistzal said. ‘I learned to expect it.’

Published on February 6, 2005 at 12:00 pm