Tobey Veenstra
The Broadside
The student government passed a motion for its executive members and finance coordinator to be involved in signing off on any future and pending expenditures after concerns about the remaining budget were raised during the April 29 meeting.
The worries came after the Associated Students of Central Oregon Community College Finance Coordinator Dustin Moore reviewed their expenditure reports.
“Our numbers have been going down,” said Moore during the meeting. “If these numbers are right then we are going to be in the hole.”
The amount spent so far this year by ASCOCC is $318,000. The group has $3,500 before reaching the total amount of fee revenue for the year. There is, however, more income that hasn’t been accounted for yet, and the carry-over from last school year is $27,000, according to the reports read by Moore. There is ambiguity about the carry-over amount though, since there was assumed to be an additional $10,000, which may have been provided by the college, said Moore and ASCOCC Advisor Taran Underdal.
“[Central Oregon Community College] put $10,000 of their own money in the checking account to start out with, it actually wasn’t an asset of ASCOCC’s … At the end of the fiscal year, to clear out the books, that checking account has to be at $10,000,” said Underdal during the meeting. She explained the college intended the money to serve as “a starting budget.”
Other council members were skeptical about the reports at the meeting because the figures are continually changing.
“I can’t trust these numbers yet until we have something a little closer,” said ASCOCC Marketing and Advertising Coordinator Brenda Pierce.
Moore and Underdal, however, explained the changes were due to expenditures still being processed.
“They’re going down because certain things keep processing … we would need 30 days of absolutely no spending,” said Underdal. “The numbers on the front page are as close to accurate as you’re going to get.”
Budget concerns also came from COCC administration members over money still owed to an attorney and a public relations consultant hired by ASCOCC to help better define its role with the college.
“I’ve already been warned by three people, Kevin Kimball [COCC’s chief financial officer] being one of them … if we’re making an agreement with the lawyer and the PR person to work on contingency until resolution then that needs to be billed in this term,” said Moore. “It is going against this year’s funds. We will break and they [COCC administration] will not let us do that.”
Although a resolution to stop expenditures was passed during ASCOCC’s previous meeting, Moore recommended a stronger plan to control expenditures.
“We made a resolution,” said Moore during the meeting, “but if you (Pierce) send off The Voice [an ASCOCC-run publication] and we go out to buy groceries then we’re still making expenditures and it needs to come to a crashing halt … This time now we need to institute it to make sure that we control what’s going on. If we don’t do that we’re going to be in trouble, even if we figure out how to get out of trouble now.”
Tobey Veenstra can be reached at Tveenstra@cocc.edu
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