Aram Ghoogasian: USAC’s delayed budget report reveals bigger problems

Accountability is a nice thing to ride into office on, but when faced with the realities of governance, it’s a difficult platform to follow through with.

The Undergraduate Students Association Council owes its student constituents a fall quarterly budget report – a document that is now almost two months overdue.

Major financial controversies this year regarding the council’s overeager surplus allocations and increase of its own members’ stipends make the timely release of the financial records of the council members even more pressing.

Now, in the 10th week of winter quarter, students still don’t know what USAC offices spent money on in the fall.

The quarterly budget reports are an initiative by the Internal Vice President’s Office designed to create transparency with councilmember expenditures. The reports lay out how much and what each respective office spent its money on.

For a council that has spent the latter half of this quarter mired in slate politics over a controversial divestment resolution vote, it is almost expected, yet still unacceptable, that this measure of financial oversight was delayed so long for the same reason.

Councilmembers need to put aside their petty partisan divisions over an ultimately symbolic vote to get the job of governance done smoothly and quickly. The clock is running out on their terms, exacerbated by the fact that elections for next year’s council kick off early next quarter.

In the waning months of this academic year, pulling the slate politics card will only stymie the governing process.

Other offices were concerned about a single office holding the reins on a transparency effort that affects the whole council, but the responsibility to manage the relationship between the council and the student body through the budget reports is firmly in the internal vice president’s job description.

Ken Myers, the former chair of the Bruins United slate and a current member of the IVP Office, was initially in charge of compiling information about office budgets. However, Myers’ former position with the slate caused some councilmembers to resist working with him because of his slate affiliation.

To circumvent this issue, IVP Avi Oved appointed fourth-year economics student Jacob Ashendorf, the nonpartisan USAC budget review director and chair of the USAC Funding Study Group, to take on the initiative.

Ashendorf reached out to councilmembers and, with some difficulty, eventually compiled a report and submitted it to the IVP Office. External Vice President Maryssa Hall never actually met with him in person and was difficult to contact, Ashendorf said. Ashendorf added that he chooses “not to speculate” as to the reason why it was so difficult to gain correspondence.

Even after Oved took Myers’ leadership of the project off the table, slate politics remained in play. Councilmembers feared that because Ashendorf’s appointment was made by Oved, who ran on the BU slate last spring, Ashendorf would be partisan as well.

What these councilmembers forget, however, is that the budget reports are a part of the platform that Oved ran on. Regardless of slate, the project has been billed as a responsibility of his office from his first day in office.

So if the appointment process was truly the major sticking point for the council, then USAC has two options: either pass the responsibility along to the Finance Committee, or make an appointment as a whole.

According to a letter to the Daily Bruin penned by Oved’s chief of staff Avinoam Baral, the Finance Committee chair Cynthia Jasso, who has held the position since the last academic year, approached the IVP Office and said that she didn’t have the time and is not interested in pursuing the project.

Although Jasso may not have the time to take on the project personally, another qualified member of the Finance Committee could shoulder the obligation. A new position on the Finance Committee could even be created by USAC for this purpose specifically.

If not, the second option is still viable.

But even if a new appointment on the nonpartisan Finance Committee is made for this specific job, there is no reason to expect everyone to cooperate. Some councilmembers continued to balk at the idea of a quarterly budget report even after an impartial person took up the task. The reports themselves are not made to make people look bad, they’re just that: reports.

If this pace of release continues, students will likely not get a winter budget report until the summer, giving students an outdated view of their financial offices heading into election.

Appointing a new person to deal with a mess USAC created for itself seems like the quickest fix, assuming this person has the time and is interested in doing the job.

Whatever choice the council makes, it must acknowledge that the current system does not work and that some of these problems could easily have been avoided. If anything, this council should set up a strong foundation for next year’s council to follow.