With more than one month of school remaining, College Council is almost bankrupt, according to Council President Hetal Doshi.
Doshi said that she plans to appeal to the Student Government Association for $5,500 in additional funding Monday.
According to Doshi, the additional funding is needed to cover $5,000 for Mortar Board's annual Buckhead Bounce, an event which the Council has funded every year, and normal expenditures for the three remaining legislative sessions.
According to Young, though the Council has $10,700 left from its original $128,882.83 general account, only $700 of that can be used for funding. Doshi said the College Council Constitution mandates that the Council retains $10,000 in its contingency fund at the end of the year. "This is a cushion in case organizations overdraw," she said.
"We don't really have a contingency plan to fall back on if SGA doesn't give us money," Doshi said. "We could overdraw our funds as the Council has done twice previously, but that would be a bad position to be in."
Former Council President Will Claiborne said it is SGA's responsibility to pass the bill. "If SGA fails to pass the bill, it would be a bad mark on the SGA. … The Mortar Board, the senior class and College Council would have a right to be angry," he said.
SGA Vice President Anna Manasco said Mortar Board, Emory's senior honor society, could appeal to the SGA for supplemental funding if the Council's bill request were denied.
Though Manasco said she could not speculate on whether the legislature would pass the bill she understood the Council's action. "If they need the money then it's worth a try," she said. "It's very difficult to see in a budget as large as theirs a deficit that small."
Doshi attributed the Council's current financial situation to new programs. "We chartered a lot of new organizations this year and funded many new and exciting programs," she said. "We've had to cut corners and literally cut dollars from many bills to conserve money."
Though the Council's general fund was low, Doshi said there was a lot of money in organizational budgets. "There's a lot money just sitting there," she said. "If we had that money now we'd be fine but we can't realign [the funding] until the end of the year."
According to Young, $8,000 from organizational budgets was not spent last year and was realigned to the Council's general account. "If we had even half of that money this year, we wouldn't have any problems," Young said. "That's why we were even more conservative in allocating budgets for next year."
Doshi said she was optimistic that the Council would not face the same problems next year. "We purposely cut back the organizational budgets for next year, so there wouldn't be money that didn't get used and we'll have more money to deal with because of Proposition 10.25," she said, referring to next year's $10.25 increase in the Student Activity Fee.
Claiborne said he did not think the Council had any financial difficulties. "This is not a huge fiscal crisis," he said. "Right now the College Council is where you'd want it to be. We spent the money on an unprecedented amount of programming. We did a lot of cutting this year and made many organizations upset, but now they can understand where we were coming from."
