The Missouri Students Association is preparing to ask the Student Fee Review Committee for an increase in student fees this November to pay for $200,000 worth of services.
The increase in fees would benefit MSA’s Department of Student Activities and other MSA auxiliaries, including the Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center, MUTV, KCOU and Tiger Pantry.
“With all the things we’re doing right now, we want to make sure (DSA and the auxiliaries are) a service to students,” MSA President Xavier Billingsley said. “We want to make sure they have a comparable budget.”
Billingsley and SFRC Chairman Chris Conant both said the increase would not have a major financial impact on students. Each student pays approximately $400 per semester in student fees, $22.06 of which goes to MSA, according to the MSA website.
The increase in student fees would total less than 1 percent, Conant said.
“$200,000 is minute in terms of the entire student fee revenue per year, which is over $20 million per fiscal year,” Conant said.
DSA would be impacted the most by the fee increases.
With seven committees ranging from college music to international programming, DSA creates and funds many events for students, including concerts and lectures.
“With that comes a lot of talent (and) expenses,” DSA director Morgan Adrian said. “The bigger the names we get or the more appealing the artist is for students on campus, the higher the cost.”
DSA’s budget also funds events such as Fall Welcome, which requires the organization to pay for food, drinks and other event costs.
Currently, DSA is 35 percent of MSA’s budget. Billingsley said he wants to provide an additional $150,000 to DSA’s budget, which has been decreasing during the past four to five years.
“We’ve been cutting money even though the prices of concerts, (lectures, comedians and films) have been increasing, so we’re not able to get the big people we used to get in the ‘90s,” Billingsley said.
DSA struggles to compete against other universities that are able to pay large fees for popular speakers and musicians, Adrian said.
“We often have to tell artists no because the price we get to negotiating is just too high for us, and they just won’t accept what we can give them,” Adrian said.
By increasing DSA’s budget, Billingsley and Adrian said they think DSA will be able to bring popular names to MU more frequently at cheaper prices.
Billingsley said he also wants $12,000 to employ another graduate student in DSA because the current graduate student works approximately 60 hours a week.
DSA is not the only division of MSA that would benefit from an increase in student fees.
The RSVP Center needs between $40,000 to $45,000 to pay for a coordinator, Billingsley said. Previously, the RSVP coordinator was paid by a grant, but the grant is running out. The money would also help pay for one of the two graduate students currently employed by RSVP.
KCOU and MUTV auxiliaries also would benefit.
Billingsley said he wants between $8,000 and $9,000 to pay a full-time professional employee to train students at the two stations.
MSA previously negotiated with the communication department to employ a teacher two days a week, only allowing him three days a week to work with MSA.
“We think that (employing the current adviser five days a week) will help improve MUTV and KCOU auxiliaries and MSA all together, because he will be here to adequately train students,” Billingsley said. “(This benefits students so) they can really learn and go do things in their field before they go into the classroom.”
The last auxiliary to benefit would be the newly added Tiger Pantry.
Though Billingsley said he thinks Tiger Pantry will be funded mainly through donations and fundraisers, he wants to create a $5,000 operating budget for the pantry.
“Tiger Pantry needs some money that’s concrete and that will be there for them all year long, so if they need to get tools or utensils … they would have a small budget to access,” Billingsley said.
Billingsley and other MSA members plan to present the budget increases to SFRC, which will approve or reject MSA’s proposed budget increases Nov. 14.
Though the fee increases might not have a large, direct effect on students, it could affect other offices and departments on campus, Conant said.
SFRC, by law, is prohibited from increasing student fees by more than the consumer price index, which constrained fee increases by 3 percent last fiscal year. SFRC will not know the exact constraint for this fiscal year until January 2013.
If MSA increases its portion of student fees, which is currently 10 percent of student fees, other services might have to limit their fee increases accordingly so student fees fall within the fee increase constraint.
“(SFRC will decide) to spend money in a way that reflects what students want and what students use on campus,” Conant said.