When Peter Grollitsch, Ashish Abraham, and John Martin announced that they would run for a second year as Undergraduate Student Association officials, they regarded it as a victory. Martin, the SA Treasurer, recently told The Spectrum: “There are two points of view. Hopefully, the cause behind it is people think we’ve done a good job this year so there isn’t an uprising to take us out of office. The other view is apathy. The truth behind it is probably somewhere in the middle.”
Student apathy can be blamed for a lot of things, but it doesn’t correct the fact that students aren’t mind readers. Not once did Visions, the SA magazine and the organization’s chief link to the public, publish a word about the head jobs going up for grabs. They certainly didn’t mention the $12,000 salary, reimbursements for cell phones, or the $2.7 million dollar budget that comes with the job.
As undergraduate enrollment climbs, so too does the SA operating budget. It has increased 23 percent in the past four years, from $2.1 million to $2.8 million, with which to benefit the needs of students as a whole. Some benefits, it seemed, had a more isolated effect.
Student Association leaders haven’t been that great at telling their fellow undergraduates about the perks of their jobs, which may have bred an actual election.
What they have learned, it seems, is how to find ways to spend other students’ mandatory fee dollars on themselves and their friends.
The ski team, for example, received a student grant through the Student Association for a $1500 condominium at Killington, Vermont. 12 students attended the trip, including SA President Peter Grollitsch. Their condo was reserved for four days and three nights, paid for by the grant.
The Irish SA, a temporary SA club, received a grant too, this one paying $658 for hotel accommodations in Boston over the St. Patrick’s Day holiday. Five students attended the trip to Boston, including Martin and another SA official, SUNY delegate Jack Niejadlik. Three of the group’s members are paid SA staff members.
For every Visions article about joining a club like Circle K, there seems to be a four page story and photo shoot of the magazine’s staff dicking around. Not too many cover stories inform students on how to get grant money to fund a spring break trip with their friends.
The Irish SA is a temporary club led by Tom Whalen, who applied for the grant as the club’s sole member. Based on the account of Irish SA, temporary clubs require very little actual work. “All you have to do to become a temporary club is walk into the SA office with eight signatures from any UB students,” Martin said. Temporary clubs, though they do not receive a budget from SA, are eligible for the SBI grant.
Grollitsch is a member of the SBI board of directors, and was present to vote on the Sub Board grants.
When asked about the ski team’s grant, Grollitsch acknowledged that while the cost may seem steep, the group paid for their own food and lift tickets. The trip, Grollitsch said, was set up to serve as club training. “People paid for lift tickets,” he said. “A lot of clubs do that. Sports clubs do the same thing.” According to the ski club ledger, part of the remainder of the money for the trip came from its own budget. This includes another $602 in gas costs and other expenses. Grollitsch says that the ski team requested the grant in order to get money to attend training at the esteemed Vermont resort.
Schussmeisters Ski Club, which has 3,000 members, received a grant for roughly the same amount this spring, to lower the costs of ski trips and offer a ski equipment tutorial. They received $100 for that tutorial, with which, as one member of the Schussmeisters board noted sarcastically, “you can buy wax.”
These trips were paid for by a grant from the student-run campus services corporation Sub Board I, which the SA helps to fund. SBI handles SA’s accounting in return. Due to the sale of a stretch of land in the 1970s, SBI has a stake in a $1 million piece of land at the end of Sweet Home Road. The liquid capital of that land pays about $20,000 annually, which is used for student grants. All six UB student associations are eligible for the grant, and members of all six governments vote on who will receive them.
This spring, for example, 61 student clubs submitted grant proposals and only 34 were approved. About half of SA’s clubs received grants, though none received the amount requested. Men’s Rugby for example, won over $1000 for expenses to compete at a tournament. Students for the Exploration and Development of Space received $1000 for a space symposium. Of the rejected were the Muslim SA who applied for two grants, one for a lecture, and one to help offset the costs of community service. Urban Renewal SA was denied funding for a trip to help rebuild New Orleans.
The grants are awarded not necessarily on the merits of their causes, explained SBI Vice President Robert Pape, but on their novelty. “More people deserved money than got it,” he said. For every grant request, the members would “ask themselves ‘is this new and expanding?’” The Irish SA received their grant, he said, because they presented a new idea. The same was true for the ski club. Martin echoes this. “A lot of what we look at for Sub Board grants is that it’s for new and expanding events, and I know that that bone marrow drive is an annual event,” he said, referring to a rejected grant by the medical association to sponsor a bone marrow drive. “Every year something comes up where someone has an event and wants to bring people in from the community, and that gets turned down because we want to spend this money on only UB students…ultimately this grant money came from the student activity fee.”
Each semester undergraduates pay a $79 student activity fee that makes up the operating budget of their Student Association. The roughly $2.7 million fund goes to the development of student clubs, and provides funding for the student-run campus services corporation, Sub Board I. The “About” section of the organization’s website reads: “The student government as a whole takes part in deciding which activities best reflect the interests of the student body.”
With such a massive budget it’s not always clear to students how that money is spent. In looking through the SA ledger on the organization’s website, Generation found several lines which did not seem to benefit the student body as a whole.
At the beginning of this school year, the SA staff took a staff trip to Toronto for three days. Orientation, said SA President Peter Grollisch, is an annual trip. This year, the trip came with a cost of nearly $17,000 of student fee money, spent for transportation, food, and rooms at the Holiday Inn on King Street in downtown Toronto. As a part of various “icebreaker” games, the group had a scavenger hunt, in which 16 staff members received $50 cash prizes.
Grollitsch said the trip was a step down from the orientation trips of recent years. “We stayed at the Holiday Inn whereas recent past years we stayed at the Sheridan or the Hilton.” The cash prizes for staff members was Grollitisch’s idea to augment participation. “In the past we would do meet and greets or give away free tickets,” he said of the scavenger hunt prizes, “but people would…just stay in their rooms.” The scavenger hunt was a huge success this year, he said, and the teams who competed in the citywide hunt were happy to be involved. “I would do it again. I can see how some people wouldn’t appreciate it,” he said, “but the cost was okay for the benefits.”
The numbers in other areas of the SA budget are similarly impressive. This year to date, SA has spent over $14,000 on Franco’s Pizza alone, not to mention all the instances of food bought at Wegman’s, or other pizzerias.
SA spent $2,150 on T-shirts for staff orientation. In January they spent $2,836.50 to buy hooded sweatshirts. For Fall Fest, they bought $5,500 worth of T-shirts. That’s not counting individual clubs’ clothing. They also spent $2400 on SA portfolios.
These items are used throughout the year, though, Grollitsch says. “The shirts for orientation were actually the blue polos which we mandate that every staff member wears for events and for each staff meeting every other Monday. They were by no means just used for the three-day orientation.”
As for the shirts bought for Fall Fest, Grollitsch says those were a necessity, too. They were used “Mostly for event staff and workers...we often have about 200 staff employed at these shows and we need to have them clearly marked.”
As for the $2400 staff folders, he said, “We have them, a lot of them, and we will be using them for many years to come.”
Grollitsch also added that this year’s Student Association operates far differently than it has in past years. For one thing, the executive board’s cell phone bills are now reimbursed only up to the $100 mark each month, as opposed to previous years in which ”SA E-board would get full bills paid for, no matter what the cost. Often I can recall bills of $400-600 for the three members.” The rest of the bill, Grollitsch says, he pays out of pocket. He also noted that the E-board bought their cell phones themselves this year, breaking from past tradition. “You will not see a reimbursement anywhere in the books for our iPhones.”
Several other questionable reimbursements were found, including a club’s purchase of a $450 Xbox 360 to award to their “Most Dedicated Member.” The UB Jam club spent $1197 on stands and hardware for a drum set. It also spent $649.99 on cymbals.
Also in question was the $2500 spent to send Entertainment Director Marc Rosenblitt, Martin, and two other SA staff members to Los Angeles for an entertainment business conference. That trip, Martin said, allowed SA to get a better insurance premium. The trip allowed “our entertainment staff to really network UB with various entertainment companies at a convention. We met a lot of people that work in the entertainment business,” he said. The trip was worth it, he said, because the group was able to find an insurance company that “ended up saving us money on Fall Fest,” Martin said.
On April 28, SA staff members will be treated to an end of year Bisons game at Dunn Tire Park. The suites are already reserved, at the cost of $1,200 of your money—but you’re not invited.. Still, if you show up, you can watch SA officials live it up while you wait on line to buy tickets. Lucky for you, it’s “Markdown Monday” down at the ballpark.
