Every year, the Missouri Students Association creates a student fee proposal for the Student Fee Review Committee. This year, a proposed bylaw change could make the details of the process official.
“Preparing the proposal is a big process, and there is no formal procedure — nothing about who writes it and how Senate passes it,” MSA Vice President Helena Kooi said.
If the bylaw change passes, this would change.
The change would officially give the vice president the responsibility of annually preparing the fee proposal. The vice president creates MSA’s budget every spring, but there is nothing specific for the vice president to do in the fall, Kooi said.
“I think this will make the position not more powerful, but more defined,” she said.
The vice president currently creates the proposal with help from the Student Life fiscal officer and the MSA Budget Committee.
After creating the proposal, the vice president takes it to MSA’s Budget Committee. Currently, this step is only implied in the MSA bylaws.
“(With the bylaw changes, MSA) wanted to state the process explicitly, rather than intrinsically,” MSA Senate Speaker Jake Sloan said.
If the budget committee rejects the proposal, the vice president has to draft a new one. If the committee approves it, the proposal goes to the MSA full Senate.
A three-fifths majority approval by MSA senators is required to pass the proposal.
Including the Senate in the process ensures the vice president does not receive too much power, Kooi said.
“What we request from SFRC is a really big deal, and I don’t think one person has the power to decide what students want,” Kooi said.
Bringing the proposal to full Senate allows for senators to provide their input, Senator Taylor Major said.
“We (senators) represent the student body, and if someone is going to the Student Fee Review Committee saying that students want a certain fee … student representatives can validate that (it) is really what students want,” he said.
If the Senate does not approve the request, a new proposal has to be created by the vice president. The Senate can approve the proposal with amendments. If the proposal passes, it goes to the SFRC.
The SFRC judges how much money MSA, alongside other MU facilities, will receive in student fees. The committee then makes its recommendations to Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Cathy Scroggs, who presents the recommendations to the UM System Board of Curators.
This year, MSA members are looking to increase funding in four areas.
“We’re still looking into (some of the requests), so I can’t give exact numbers,” Kooi said. “I can say that the end report will have requests in four different areas.”
Of the four areas, the top priority is securing the Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center coordinator’s salary, which is being funded by a grant that expires this upcoming year. [As stated in a previous Maneater article](https://www.themaneater.com/stories/2012/9/28/msa-clarifies-their-request-fund-reallocation/), this would cost between $40,000 and $50,000.
The next priority is making KCOU and MUTV’s student media coordinator a full-time position. Currently, MSA pays for the position part-time. As stated in the previous Maneater article, this would cost roughly $8,000.
MSA is still looking into the needs and costs of creating an operational budget for Tiger Pantry and increasing funds for the Department of Student Activities, Kooi said.
“Everything right now is speculation,” Major said. “If (Kooi and the executive cabinet) think this stuff is useful, they should definitely go after it. So far, I am fully behind it.“
Though the actual request is still in speculation, Kooi said these bylaw changes are the best improvement to the MSA Senate process in which she has been involved.
“It may seem like a really small detail but I think this will have a big impact on how MSA operates,” she said. “I think this will make MSA more efficient, more transparent and get more people involved in the process.”
