Editors note – a previous version of this article had an incorrect quote that has now been corrected. 

Student Government (SG) receives $500,000 a year, holds $300,000 in reserves and budgeted out $424,000 for the 2023 fiscal year. We broke down where this money came from and where it’s going. 

Miles Calzini, a graduate student studying chemistry and Student Senate president, explained where these numbers come from.

“We have over $500,000 of revenue that we take in every year,” Calzini said. “About $300,000 of that goes toward appropriations, $100,000 goes toward our professional staff and another $100,000 goes toward all other expenses.”

According to Student Body Treasurer Harrison Andrews, a fourth-year studying political science and communication, about 50% of SG’s yearly student fee revenue goes into appropriations.

“Our fee is supposed to go toward student organizations through our appropriations process,” Andrews said. “Internally, there’s a minimum amount of our fee revenue that has to go to preparations every year.”

Andrews said SG provides appropriations to different clubs and organizations on campus to support events and initiatives they have planned. 

“We give a lot of club sports funding to help them travel to competitions across the country, so organizations like club water polo, club cross country,” Andrews said. “We also give a lot to graduate student associations … and greek organizations.”

Calzini said there’s been a spike in appropriation requests since the pandemic. 

“After COVID, we’ve seen an increase in appropriation requests because of how competitive it has been for the organizations applying,” Calzini said. “Right now, I think we have had over 200 organizations receive funding and over 300 applied.” 

According to Calzini, SG handled the increased requests by using their reserves.

“So we think of our reserves as a bank account … and we ended up adding [some] money from our reserves to appropriations,” Calzini said.

Andrews said the money in reserves built up during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“So during COVID in March of 2020, we had to cancel our appropriations because of everything happening in the world,” Andrews said. “During that time, we built up a large cash reserve and the money from June of this year was about $300,000.” 

Andrews said the Student Senate took some of the money out of reserves to go towards the appropriations budget to make up for the canceled appropriations during the pandemic. The total amount in appropriations SG put aside for student organizations was $168,300, which can be seen on the budget. 

“So the bill [BB-01] was to move [$60,000] money from our cash reserve into our current fiscal year budget,” Andrews said. “This went towards this fall preparation cycle for student organizations.” 

Click here to see the full breakdown of SG’s budget for the 2023 fiscal year.