Silver City, NM- On Monday, March 27th, at 7:00 PM in the Miller Library, ASWNMU called a special meeting in order to discuss and pass the two student fees that were tabled at the previous meeting: Student Life and Mustang Entertainment. This special meeting was called due to the Board of Regents having their meeting later in the week on Thursday, March 30th, where the Regents would either approve or disapprove the proposed student fee changes. If the board disapproved, ASWNMU would have to start their proposition completely over. However, according to several student government members, a compromise was made on the proposed fees due to the amount of support both entities received at the last public meeting.
In an exclusive interview, several student government executives gave their insight as to how the last public meeting went from their position. Dylan Kester, Vice-President, was pleased at how many students showed up to this public meeting since the attendance rate has never been particularly high for Student Government. He hopes to see the same amount for the last handful of meetings for the end of the school year.
Based on the responses to the proposed fees, both Tim Stillman, ASWNMU Treasurer and Kester stated that Student Government is not responsible whatsoever for what certain departments do with their budgets. Tim also suggested that if Student Life wishes to continue with Alternative Spring Breaks, that there are plenty of opportunities to do it “closer to home.”
Student Government’s mission is to simply be an advocate for the students, and in listening to what it is they want, they believed that decreasing fees in any way is the best direction to go right now. Also mentioned at the last meeting was that the whole school is working on retention rates, and given that the numbers keep going up in the future, there would not be a need for student fees to be so high because of the deficit being made up for it in attendance. But until that point is reached, this is what they would like to keep going with.
Also in the case of where clubs will go, Jessica Morales, director of Student Life, said at the last public meeting that she would not take on clubs if such a big cut were to be taken from her budget. But ASWNMU is not concerned about whether or not the change will happen this year. Instead, they want to turn as much of their attention as they can to “make their program better by revamping, having a significant increase in training, and fixing the communication issue overall.”
Also mentioned was that Athletics was initially supposed to receive a decrease, but Kester said that President Shepard himself approached student government upon hearing that they wanted to propose this, and asked that they allocate the fees elsewhere so Athletics could receive a $1.00 increase instead. In an interview with Shepard, he mentioned that, “we are third to last in the Lone Star Conference in regards to our Athletics budget, so any cut would not be of any help to our program.”
Cuts to Student Life and Mustang Entertainment were ultimately changed from $7.50 per credit hour to $7.35 per credit hour for Student Life and from $0.55 a credit hour to $0.50 a credit hour for Mustang Entertainment. The new proposed cuts save both entities ten and five cents a credit hour.
Student Fees were finally presented to the Board of Regents on Thursday, March 30 where they were passed.
Additional Reporting by Eric Lowe and Claudie Thompson
