By: Eric Gillis
Recently, a proposal was put forward to the Student Representative Assembly by current President Teddy Saull, asking that the SRA vote to allow the MSU spend a whopping $215,000 on a “year-end celebration.”
Or, in other words, a gigantic party. A huge, expensive party that costs you $215,000 of your money. To the proposal’s credit, there are “cheaper” options, but all of them, save for the absolute “cheapest,” are in the six-figure range and even the cheapest one is a superbly inexpensive $95,000 of your money.
And the kicker? You’d still have to pay for tickets. So not only is this proposal suggesting we should spend a huge sum of your money on a party, but that you should have to pay a fee on top of it to attend the events of this party.
The proposal does acknowledge that this is a “substantial amount” of money, but then goes on whimsically waxing poetic of dreams in an attempt to reassure everyone that it’s all okay. You see, the proposal informs delightfully: we, as an organization, have a surplus. And we shouldn’t have a surplus, because we’re a non-profit organization. Hence, this huge expensive, gigantic, party will help us get rid of our surplus like any good non-profit student government should strive to do.
This is indeed true. A non-profit should absolutely be striving to not have a surplus. I agree with the sentiment entirely, as I’m sure most of my fellow SRA members do. But I want to talk about priorities.
Consider the following: why is it that we can apparently manage to pull something like this off with a six-figure price tag in a mere four months, yet we are evidently incapable as an organization of getting even a rudimentary implementation of a women’s centre on campus in a timely manner without significant bureaucratic mess and delay? How is it that an absolutely massive party is a more easily accomplished endeavour? For over three years now there has been an active movement to make the Women and Gender Equity Network happen – this is not a new conversation. So where’s the women’s centre?
What about your financial needs? Don’t you wish there was a little more emergency financial aid available? The MSU could be providing that. If we have a surplus we need to be getting rid of couldn’t we be helping our fellow McMaster students in need? Wouldn’t that be more in line with what we should be doing as an organization?
Further, didn’t Union Market raise its prices on coffee recently? Aren’t some of the prices on goods in Union Market, like chips, overpriced? If we’re making a surplus, do we need to be charging those prices? The same goes for TwelvEighty. If we have a surplus we need to get rid of, couldn’t we be charging a little less and actually put together some healthy nutritious meals for students on a budget?
And what about our student employees? We pay most of them a wage that is well below the poverty line. Yet, we have a surplus that we evidently need to get rid of. So, why don’t we strive to pay all of our student employees a living wage? This would help our fellow student employees with their school fees and, given our financial situation, would be a prudent financial decision. Why not invest in our employees?
The answer to these questions is quite simply: priorities.
By: Daniel D'Angela
The typical Student Representative Assembly meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. “O Canada” is played by 6:45 and the next two to four hours are spent talking about various issues regarding governance and post-secondary education.
All pretty exciting stuff in my opinion, but I will admit it’s not a page-turner. However, this Oct. 19, the meeting will be very different. At this upcoming SRA meeting, your student representatives will be voting on allocating $215,000 from the MSU to a spring McMaster Send-Off concert.
I will be voting in support of this allocation. An expenditure of his size comes with many legitimate concerns and questions that I will try to address.
The first concern is that the MSU should be funding services, instead of recreational events. The MSU is one of the most important service providers for students. This past fiscal year, the MSU spent more than $3.5 million on over 20 student services, from the Child Care Centre to EFRT. These services greatly enrich student life, and make McMaster a safer and more inclusive community.
We also have one of the strongest Campus Events staff in the country; hosting shows of such international acclaim as Steve Angello and Lil' Jon.
We are not forced to make a choice between great entertainment and great services. Fun events and investing in student-run events are not mutually exclusive, and our record proves that.
Another concern is that spending so much money on a concert is financially irresponsible. Over the last three fiscal years the MSU has run a $1.5 million surplus and this year a projected $130,000 surplus.
We currently have over $5 million in reserves in cash and near-cash assets. According to our own comptroller Maggie Gallagher, “the success of the past three years has put the organization in a very healthy financial position.
The year-end celebration is a financial risk that we are ready to handle.” After accounting for projected ticket sales, we would lose at most $90,000 for the MSU, still leaving a healthy $40,000 projected surplus in 2014.
In our constitution, it states that we will “draw into a true society all students at McMaster University” by “foster[ing] activities and events which will enhance the University experience of its members and contribute to the life of the University as a whole.” Nothing better outlines and clarifies why this concert would be such a boon to McMaster and its students.
This concert would bring together over 6,000 students, making it the largest event in our history. It would change the game, not only at Mac, but all Canadian universities. It would it provide a phenomenal experience to at least a quarter of our members, provide value to members who traditionally are not always targeted by our services, create a new tradition, and build campus pride.
To provide one last piece of encouragement for this motion: our last concert sold out in 36 hours and 2,000 students attended. Our Welcome Week concerts routinely have over 5,000 attendees and cost $50,000 each. Now imagine what we could do with $215,000.
The McMaster Students Union has released audits of its financial statements, showing the state of the union’s money from the past academic year.
The MSU, a multi-million dollar organization, is responsible for maintaining a number of services and organizations across campus, which is done through the accumulation of student fees from each full-time undergrad. It collects additional funds through its businesses, including Union Market and the Underground.
“KPMG combed through all the financials of the past twelve months,” explained MSU VP (Finance) Jeff Doucet of the process. The external auditing firm was called in, as part of standard procedure, to assess the organization’s financial health.
The audits were publicly released at the end of October and were put up for discussion at a meeting of the Student Representative Assembly on Nov. 3. Representatives took the opportunity to pick through the details of the reports, asking questions of the VP Finance before ultimately voting to approve the documents.
The MSU finished the 2012-13 academic year with a surplus of more than $300,000. While this represents only about three per cent of the MSU’s operating budget of $12,235,578, as a registered not-for-profit organization it is meant to be completely revenue neutral.
Doucet acknowledged the need for a plan for the extra money, as recommended by the external auditors.
“We need an actual capital growth plan. That’s a plan we don’t necessarily have right now,” he said.
While the organization as a whole ran a surplus for the year, certain services within the MSU saw a deficit in 2012-13, among them the Emergency First Response Team, the McMaster dental plan, and Compass Information Service.
Compass, for example, saw a drop in revenue of about $600,000 and ran an overall deficit of $30,486.
“GO Transit has moved to Presto cards, which is very convenient for students, but obviously it’s resulted in less revenue for Compass—when we sell tickets at Compass we’re earning a percentage of revenue,” explained Doucet.
On the other hand, McMaster’s campus radio station, CFMU, finished the year with a surplus of $193,785, a significant portion of the organization’s revenue, most of which comes from a portion of student fees. However, McMaster students voted in January 2013 to decrease the levy given to CFMU from $17.45 per student to $12.50, which is buy viagra soft tabs expected to eliminate the large surplus in future.
The results of the audit are publicly available, accessible on the MSU website.
That the MSU’s finances ended up in the black this year has got to be a relief.
The students union is only a few years removed from deep operating losses. The 2007-08 and 2008-09 financial statements combined for what were then record shortfalls of more than $500,000. That included a campus bar – called Quarters before it underwent an approximately $400,000 facelift to become TwelvEighty in 2009 – that lost a total of almost $780,000.
The following year, the deficit skyrocketed to a loss of $958,190, roughly two-thirds of which was the responsibility of a failing student health insurance plan.
But the 2011-12 audited financial statements, which were passed and made public at the Sept. 30 Student Representative Assembly meeting, showed an issue of another kind. The not-for-profit MSU collected close to a million dollars more in student fees than it spent last year.
What is supposed to be a break-even organization wasn’t intended to make near that amount of money. A $150,000 loss in 2010-11 was budgeted to improve to a modest surplus of just over $120,000 in the year that followed.
“If we’re continuously posting profits, that’s an issue. Obviously, the larger they are, the more of an issue it is,” said Jeff Wyngaarden, Vice-President (Finance) of the MSU.
A few things went right. TwelvEighty cut its losses down to roughly $71,000 from $200,000 the year before. Underground Media & Design boosted its profits by more than a hundred thousand dollars. Losses on MSU services decreased in a few departments, and the health and dental plans went from being budgetary burdens to small sources of extra cash.
“In any one given year, breaking even may not be a good thing. Coming off of four years of substantial losses, posting a profit isn’t a major concern,” said Wyngaarden.
But now that a portion of the losses have been recuperated, there are areas of the budget where student fees are, at least for now, unnecessarily high.
CFMU posted a profit of more than $150,000. The campus radio station receives a set levy via the MSU annually, and has consistently spent well below their allotment in recent years.
The plan, according to Wyngaarden, is to increase spending in order to bring expenditures closer to revenues in the CFMU Fund. An expansion of programming and more emphasis on community outreach are in store.
The MSU has also switched providers for its student health insurance plan. The student fee for the plan now exceeds the actual cost by about ten dollars per student. That money will stockpile into a reserve fund for the time being.
Wyngaarden also hopes to work with the SRA’s finance committee to establish a strategic reserve fund, into which future surpluses would go.
“Right now, when we make money, it just gets put in the bank, more or less, and it sits there for a rainy day. What I’d like to do is earmark that money as a strategic reserve, and that’s mostly putting a name to what we already have,” he said.
“We’d have that set aside, and then set a policy-based plan for making profit if we’ve had a loss in previous year or having a loss if we’ve made a profit in previous years.”
The MSU spent a total of over $12.5 million last year on its operations. Almost half of that amount came from fees charged to full-time undergraduate students.
