The AMS’s 2010-11 budget is coming up for approval tonight, and it’s something councilors should be looking at very closely, as there are some concerning things in there.
First of all, the format used makes it difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on sometimes. There are no actual totals from last year included, and lines that have been eliminated from the budget (Block Party, Equity and Diversity, Safety Coordinator, Policy Analyst) do not appear in the document to let you know that they did in fact exist in last year’s budget.
Going into the content, it’s important to know that this budgeting process has been ongoing for a while now. Back in March, council overwhelmingly supported the principle of eliminating the structural deficit. And this budget has met that goal: nothing is coming out of unreplenished funds (savings, essentially) to make it balance.
However, how they ended up there is not exactly how they said they’d do it in March. At the time, they played the doomsday card in order to undertake the cutting/restructuring of some AMS Services, Equity, and Safety. And it wasn’t just the services that would be cut; other parts of the AMS would suffer too. The preliminary budget presented in March summarized the major cuts as follows:
| Change in Prelim Budget | Description | Change in Actual Budget |
|---|---|---|
| – 22,000 | Contribution to UBC Ombuds Office | – 22,000 |
| – 15,000 | Safety Office | – 15,000 |
| – 12,000 | Equity and Diversity | – 11,300 |
| – 6,000 | AMS Ombuds Office | – $5,500 |
| – 42,000 | Exec Offices | + 28,000 |
| – 11,000 | SAC | – 11,000 |
| + 24,000 | Committee Chairs | + 26,000 |
| – 7,000 | FirstWeek | – 15,000 |
| – 7,000 | Welcome Back BBQ | – 9,000 |
| – 7,000 | Block Party | – 38,000 (eliminated) |
For the most part, they stuck to the targets, with two glaring exceptions. At the time, they still planned to hold Block Party, albeit with a reduced budget. Instead, they unceremoniously dumped the entire event.
And then there’s that line that goes from a fairly large red number on the left to a fairly large green number on the right: Exec Offices. Rather than trimming their budgets by $42,000 as promised, it actually increased by $28,000.
