In the next few weeks, the AU Club Council will release its 2008-2009 budget, which will affect the activities of more than 200 clubs and organizations on campus for the rest of the academic year.
AUCC Chair Alex Livingston said the AUCC will distribute between $130,000 and $150,000 in university funds. The Student Government determines how much funding the AUCC will be able to distribute.
"Last year our budget was $130,000 and in total the clubs requested a sum of $400,000," he said. "Obviously that's just completely impossible."
Since the AUCC is not able to fully fund everyone's requests, many club executive board members and club members respond with frustration.
In other instances, the AUCC won't fund a club's funding request because the club's proposal is "just plain ridiculous," he said.
"We want people to be reasonable," he said. "So if you're telling us that you want to host a dinner for your club, we're all for that. If we do the math and realize you want the dinner to be $40 per person, we're not going to look favorably on that."
As part of the agreement, all clubs must fundraise 10 percent of what they are requesting from the AUCC, Livingston said. If this does not seem feasible for the club or it seems that it has no plan of action to fundraise, that shows bad management, he said. The club ought to reconsider how they are going to support themselves in some way, he said.
This problem tends to arise most often with clubs that want to just be open to graduate school students, Livingston said. Such clubs will not receive much funding because it would only permit such a small population of the university as a whole to partake in the club's activities.
Each club's funding is based on a club's history. A variety of the club's characteristics factor into the budgeting process. These factors include how many speakers the club brought to campus, how many people participate in the club and how many events it runs each year. Both Livingston and vice chair of the AUCC, Ben Holt said that each plays a factor in deciding the stipend that the given organization will receive.
However, the club's past seemed to be most important, Livingston said.
AU College Republicans President Luke Kraus said he would like to see more emphasis placed on the College Republican's past activities when the AUCC decides their budget.
"The College Democrats are holding us back," he said. "If you look at budgeting history, the AUCC grants the exact same amount of money to both the College Democrats and College Republicans every single year. If you look at our histories, that's just not fair."
The AU College Democrats and College Republicans have received the same amount of AUCC funding since the 2005-2006 school year, The Eagle previously reported.
The AU College Republicans brought 12 speakers to the campus in the past year, including Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex., and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Tex., according to the club's Web site.
The College Democrats brought four speakers in the past year, according to President Luke Falcon Sapp.
"I've had students who are Democrats come up to me and say 'I wish the College Democrats were doing as much as you guys do,'" Kraus said. "Somehow, we're still getting the same funding as them."
Falcon Sapp said he agreed that the two organizations should not get the same level of funding but added that membership should be the controlling factor.
"I agree with Luke Kraus in that the College Democrats and College Republicans should be funded differently," he said in an e-mail. "I am frustrated that our club funding has been identical to the College Republicans when our organization has, by far, more members."
Livingston said the AUCC plans to alter their criteria this year.
"We are going to try harder this year to look at organizations for their history and not in a partisan way," he said. "If one club does more than another, then it deserves more funding."
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