By Hannah Ziegler

The University of Maryland Student Government Association passed an act at a March 3 meeting establishing a general election referendum question on funding for the MaryPIRG student organization.

The SGA debated the MaryPIRG referendum for over a month, with the original act being introduced to the legislature on Feb. 3. The referendum asks students whether funds from the Student Activities Fee should support the salaries of the MaryPIRG state director and campus organizer.

MaryPIRG is a non-partisan student organization that provides students with training and professional support to tackle issues such as climate change, poverty, and public health.

The MaryPIRG bill’s controversy arose from an SGA bylaw that states student organizations cannot use their funding to provide professional salaries to their organizers. However, organizations can override this bylaw by holding a referendum in an SGA general election. 

The March 3 SGA meeting brought the bill back to formal debate after the body tabled it following a two-hour debate at its meeting on Feb. 10. Representatives spent around three hours on March 3 debating amendments and clarifications to the bill that the bill’s sponsor had worked on since its tabling. 

SGA representatives amended the bill to strike the funding proposal for the MaryPIRG state director. The referendum that will appear before students prior to the SGA election in April will only propose allocating a salary to the MaryPIRG campus organizer. 

Students who support MaryPIRG believe that striking the state director’s salary will hinder the organization’s ability to continue its reach on campus. 

“The state director was instrumental in helping the MaryPIRG climate change campaign lobby the Maryland General Assembly. We won’t be able to do things like that in the future without her,” said the bill’s sponsor, Off-Campus Outlying Rep. Tatiana Johnson.

The amended bill that passed requests $34,040.44 to fund the salary of only the MaryPIRG campus organizer. This would allocate roughly 1.7% of funds from the total Student Activities Fee, which amounts to about $1.30 of the total fee paid by a full-time student and about 65 cents of the total fees paid by a part-time student.

Representatives amended the first paragraph of the referendum to make the language of the referendum question less biased. Some representatives thought that stating the work MaryPIRG has done would incentivize students to support the bill without question.

A criticism of the bill arose when SGA representatives read student concerns submitted by MaryPIRG members before restarting the bill’s debate. Student constituents in MaryPIRG shared their perspectives on how important the organization was to them and how upset they would be if MaryPIRG didn’t exist on campus. 

Many representatives found the student concern submissions alarming because the bill’s passage would have no impact on whether MaryPIRG can continue to exist on campus. Some representatives like Denton Rep. Ayzhan Murphy reversed their support for the bill. Murphy said she didn’t feel comfortable supporting the bill because of how uninformed students were.

“I thought that [the student concerns] meant that the leaders of MaryPIRG were not completely honest when they talked about what the bill is actually about. That made me more inclined to vote against it because the leaders were not truthful with their members,” Murphy said. 

Board Chair of MaryPIRG Students Greeshma Anand said that MaryPIRG would “cease to exist as it is” without sufficient salary funding from the Student Activities Fee. 

Anand said that MaryPIRG has struggled to receive funding for their state director and campus organizer for the past few years. If the organization goes through another year without funding their organizers, they will have to downsize their usual operations. 

Despite this, many SGA representatives believed that MaryPIRG is using its large reach across campus to request special treatment.

Anand said that MaryPIRG was not requesting special treatment because the referendum request is a process that is open to all student groups on campus.

“All student groups can benefit from funding referendums. But we are the only one who takes the opportunity. This isn’t something in the bylaws that says, ‘only MaryPIRG can request a referendum,’” Anand said.

Representatives also took issue with how MaryPIRG claims to be a nonpartisan group but has promoted political activities on their social media platforms.

Business Representative Ayelette Halbfinger said during the March 3 SGA meeting that she saw MaryPIRG repost information on Instagram about an event hosted by UMD Young Democratic Socialists of America. Many representatives questioned how MaryPIRG claims to be nonpartisan but supports political issues.

Johnson said that the political issues that MaryPIRG promotes, such as progressive environmental policies, don’t discredit the organization’s nonpartisan values. 

“Frankly, a lot of the issues that MaryPIRG works on are things that I think the entire student body is a part of,” Johnson said. “Whether that be combating food security or climate change, I think the student body can agree these things are important, and they’re things that MaryPIRG focuses on.” 

Other representatives raised the point that even if the SGA considers MaryPIRG to be a partisan organization, this should not disqualify them from holding a referendum.

SGA Chief Financial Officer, Kane Zambelli, said the Student Government Association is not allowed to fund partisan organizations by state law, so MaryPIRG’s partisanship must come into question at some point.

These criticisms of MaryPIRG’s request for special treatment and partisanship from the university’s SGA are far from new. 

The organization has struggled to receive funding for its organizers consistently over the last five years. The Diamondback reported in 2017 that a 2016 referendum saw 75% of the 1,576 UMD students who voted support funding for MaryPIRG staff. Despite this, the SGA denied funding to MaryPIRG in 2017, and the student organization only secured funds through an appeals process. 

The SGA has approved similar funding requests to this year’s in the past, allocating $32,800 in salaries for the state director and campus organizer positions in the 2015 fiscal year, according to the Diamondback and an SGA referendum document. However, these funds were never spent and were returned to the SGA.

There is a precedent of MaryPIRG using referendums to apply for SGA funding every two years. The SGA Finance Committee has usually denied the consensus and refused to fund MaryPIRG after past referendums. MaryPIRG has then contested the funding decision through appeals processes, like the one in 2017. A similar situation could result if UMD students pass the 2021 referendum. 

The SGA ultimately passed the bill 19 – 14 with one abstention, and students will vote on the referendum in April. The referendum results are non-binding to the SGA, which means that even if students vote in favor of MaryPIRG funding, the SGA is not obligated to allocate the requested amount.

Anand said that the bill’s passage provided an overwhelming sense of relief to MaryPIRG members and executives, despite the unsatisfactory amendments and another long battle of the SGA general election season in April. 

“It’s been a long road coming here, so it’s just good to see that our hard work paid off. MaryPIRG is excited to move forward and provide more information on how [the referendum] process works, who we are and what we do,” Anand said.

Featured image: SGA representatives debated the amended referendum bill for nearly three hours at their meeting March 3. Photo by Hannah Ziegler.