By Andrew Mollenauer

The University of Maryland’s Student Government Association proposed capping student organizations’ spending funds to $20,000 per academic year, spurring an uproar from notable engineering clubs. 

The bill proposal, submitted by SGA’s financial affairs committee on Sept. 25, would be an unprecedented change to the funding of student organizations on campus. The legislation will be voted on Wednesday, Oct. 2.

While all of SGA’s sponsored clubs would be impacted, engineering students claim their clubs would suffer. 

If the bill is passed, it would place the governing body’s first spending cap on student organizations in its 105-year history. 

SGA said that as of Wednesday afternoon, an amendment to increase the proposed amount to $22,500 and to have the measure go into effect next fall was being considered.

Pranav Ramesh, SGA’s vice president of financial affairs, proposed the bill and said it is simply a pragmatic step toward equity.

“I want [the organizations] to be successful,” said Ramesh, a senior finance and government and politics major. “I just don’t think it’s equitable for us to spend well beyond $20,000 in miscellaneous supplies for individual groups when that proportion of the student activities fee fund is out of line with the proportion of the student body that they are representing.”

Terps Racing member Nicholas Kingsbury, a senior mechanical engineering major, attended last Wednesday’s SGA meeting. During public comment, Kingsbury argued that the drastic change to funding would compromise a widely favorable view of Maryland’s engineering school.

Terps Racing comprises more than 120 students who design and build various race cars for competitions, according to its website. 

“To show up to many student competitions with a 33% budget would probably reflect pretty poorly on that,” Kingsbury said. 

Nicholas Cohen, a senior materials science major and Terps Racing member, told officials a funding cap will threaten clubs like his. 

“I just [want] to reinforce the fact that these clubs are super important for the student experience,” Cohen said.

Cohen said that Terps Racing currently receives $60,000 in annual funding from the SGA. 

Cohen said he’s proud of the, “many, many great graduates from these clubs,” as a result of the opportunities the organizations provide. 

In his comments to the SGA, Cohen also accused the finance committee of “purposefully” making it difficult for Terps Racing to submit requests for miscellaneous items. 

According to Student Body President Reese Artero, a senior criminology and criminal justice major, Cohen and Kingsbury’s club is treated the same as every one of the more than 400 student organizations that are SGA-sponsored.  

“We did not make this process with only the engineering students in mind …There’s a plethora of different student organizations who have different wants and have different needs and different missions and values,” Artero said. “Imposing a cap is not necessarily something that we use to hurt students; it is more [about] having more money available to other students.”

Ramesh said current circumstances necessitate the proposed measure. 

“There is that sort of push factor in the sense that we are budget-constrained,” Ramesh said. “We’ve had to cut budgets across the board [previously], we had to see what was driving some of these excesses.”

According to Artero, TerpsRacing currently receives drastically more money than what’s typical for sponsored organizations; she said only about 1% of these clubs ask for more than $20,000 per year.

Kingsbury said his belief in clubs like his is steadfast. Like Cohen, he believes they’re conducive to students’ development beyond graduation. 

“These clubs have greatly strengthened so many people’s careers and personal growth,” Kingsbury said before the SGA meeting. “This [bill] would be extremely detrimental.”

Artero said the burden is on all clubs to be careful with miscellaneous spending so that there can be a more equitable landscape across which all constituents’ needs are met.  

“In the sense of fairness to other student groups, if students are asking for more than $20,000 in one budget category, it might be something internally … that they should be looking at in terms of, ‘you shouldn’t be having a club that you can’t necessarily provide a sustainable funding model for,’” Artero said.

Featured Image: The University of Maryland’s Student Government Association gathers on Wednesday, Sept. 25, in the Charles Carroll Room of the Adele H. Stamp Student Union for their general body meeting. Photo by Andrew Mollenauer.