On Wednesday night, the Student Activities Commission held a roundtable to present preliminary ideas for their new funding guidelines, which they have entitled the “Comprehensive Budget System.” This system, which may debut as early as next semester, takes pieces from the two previous sets of funding guidelines (event-by-event and programming arc) and ties them together in a package that resembles the U.S. tax code.

Under the proposed system (nothing permanent has been written about it yet— these are still ideas), SAC’s fiscal pie would be divided into four slices: The comprehensive budget, an ad-hoc fund, a travel fund, and SAC reserves/ operational expenses.

Comprehensive budget

The comprehensive budget would be determined during a budget summit during the previous semester, and would assign bulk allocations based on group-determined descriptions of events. This process is similar to that of the programming arc, except that the event types would be eliminated in favor of straight attendance-and-cost values. Because there are no standardized event types, each budget would have to be approved by an appraisal of each line item. The allocation would be lump-sum, so groups would have the ability to move funds around from event to event as they saw fit. Here’s an outline of the approval process:

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