The Residence Halls Association Congress voted on and approved two bills Monday evening that will clarify aspects of the organization’s budget and procedures regarding it.

Unanimously approved by all representatives present at the Congress, Bill 002 requires the organization to allocate $2,500 from its budget each semester to fund five $1,000 scholarships throughout the year, which will be distributed in a competition conducted by the judicial branch of RHA.

While the organization has offered and funded five scholarships through allocations from its budget for the past several years, the bylaws contained no requirements stipulating the value of the scholarships or how they were to be funded. By writing such requirements into the bylaws, RHA has, in effect, mandated that it continue its traditional practices in regards to offering scholarships.

“This bill will give the scholarships strong backing and make sure they are offered as a regular thing,” bill co-author Anurag Chandran said to the Congress. “It also makes our budget more clear and professional.”

Also unanimously approved was Bill 003, which will require that the funds generated from the fines assessed to halls whose representatives are absent from RHA meetings be placed into the organization’s Legislative Distribution fund. In this fund, residents and organizations can request money for events and other projects that will benefit residents.

Previously, these monies were allocated to the scholarship fund, where they sometimes went unused and were ultimately rolled over into the next year’s budget, since the organization had been, in practice, funding scholarships directly from its own budget as opposed to using funds generated from fines.

The intention of this bill is to simplify the organization’s budget procedures and allow residents to have access to the money generated by fines through funding requests. Under the current budget, students did not have access to these funds, which usually end up being rolled over to the next semester. Because of this, they could not be used to benefit the students from whose hall fees the fines were paid because most of them would no longer be living in the residence halls.