The Board of Trustees (BOT) voted in favor of a motion to approve the Services and Activities Committee’s (S&A) proposed budgets, but with a few additional stipulations. The proposed budgets, impacting a variety of organizations across campus, will not be quadrennial, as proposed, but rather will take effect only during the 2025-2026 academic year. This means that organizations can present new requests for three-year base funding at the end of the 2025-2026 school year.
The decision came after extended deliberations, in which the importance of student voices was repeatedly brought up, and the idea of precedence came under serious consideration. Programs still retaining base funding by the S&A proposed budgets will be able to apply for both base funding adjustments, or supplemental funding come October next year. However, programs that received total cuts, such as Theatre, Film, Mariachi and Lion Rock, will have to wait until the end of the 2025-2026 school year to re-apply for base funding.
Gladys Gillis, one of the Trustees, started the deliberations by outlining the situation. “No one broke any rules, I think we established that yesterday through the conversation,” Gillis said. “But I also felt that in the minutes of the group you’d say that they felt like they didn’t have adequate information as a group of young people in an educational environment dealing with issues that are probably the first time they’ve been in these spaces dealing with these issues. [And] rather than taking a pause and researching the information, they chose to move forward and get done with the job.”
Joel Klucking, senior VP of finance and administration, proposed the original idea that was later adopted by the board. “There is middle ground there,” Klucking said. “The S&A committee does have fairly substantial reserves. We could … do something in between.”
“We could fund the two things that were very closely related to an academic program for a year potentially spending in a deficit by $70,000 and give a year for reconsideration by the S&A committee to come back and reevaluate next year,” Klucking continued “We could also do the quadrennial budget as a one-year budget so it’s not a four-year decision. There’s things that this group can do that doesn’t overturn the decision of the S&A committee, to value the voice of the students, but still value the contributions of student media.”
Student Voices
Prior to the start of the deliberations, seven students and staff gave comments to the committee pleading with them to overturn the proposed budgets, citing a plethora of reasons including alleged procedural errors by the S&A committee. The speakers represented student media, Theatre, rugby, Lion Rock, the CWU pool, a community partnership proposal, and ASCWU and were each given two minutes to speak.
Gunner Stuns, CWU student and Editor-In-Chief of PULSE Magazine said in his comment, “I urge you to listen to the voices of students at CWU. Seven people [on the S&A committee] have been entrusted to act in the interest of thousands, and based on hundreds of petition signatures and protest attendees, they have not done so.”
The meeting took place over a two day period, with public comment and preliminary questions happening on Thursday and the final voting and deliberations ending on Friday. The Friday deliberations contained the bulk of the questioning within the BOT, and led to the final decision.
Eli Alvarado, the 2024-2025 student trustee and also a member of the S&A Committee, said during the deliberations, “I understand that there was some steamrolling because there were 16 hours of debate and recommendations that were happening. I don’t see really a possibility where the students, like you’re saying, the students on the S&A committee will change their decision given how unanimous it was.”
“I, as a student trustee, think that the best way forward for the betterment of students is to move [the budget] back to the S&A committee so that more students have a voice, so then we can respect those students’ voices as well,” Alvarado continued.
During his statements, Alvarado also repeatedly stated that he thought the S&A committee needed policy changes to avoid similar situations in the future.Having served on this year’s S&A committee, he abstained from voting on the proposed budget at the Trustees meeting.
Addressing the S&A Committee
One trustee, Jeff Charbonneau, argued the weight of overturning the budget, stating that it could set a dangerous precedent for future S&A decisions. “I just really want to be careful,” Charbonneau said, “That we never step into a scenario where we are telling the students what we value to be funded out of the S&A committee. Because it’s the student’s accounts. It’s the student’s money … I want to respect the student voice in this system. And so that’s where I get very, very leery. Let’s make sure that we’re respecting the committee that’s making sure that we’re reflecting the student’s voice on how they want to spend that money.”
The trustees also debated the importance of student media, and a free press at CWU. “That’s a bigger question we’re not going to address here. But I think one that we should strongly consider,” Jeff Hensler, a trustee, said. “I think having independent press is a long-standing tradition on a campus and something that I think is very valuable as an institution.”
During the deliberations, the idea that S&A processes need to be changed so that a situation like this does not arise again in the future was repeatedly brought up. Specifically, the idea of allowing a period of “appeal” after S&A proposed budgets where students can work to mend the proposed budgets before it’s sent to the Board of Trustees was discussed. Wohlpart, in relation to those ideas, said, “We’re going through that process. Veronica [Gomez Vilchis, VP student engagement and success] is already moving through that process.”
Eventually, citing issues with how overturning the budget would affect current timelines, and most notably with the precedent sending back the budget would set, the board voted in favor of a decision to approve the proposed budget, but with the aforementioned stipulations.
An Editor’s Note on The Future of The Observer
There are still a lot of questions I see floating around about what this decision means for The Observer, and so I’d like to take a few paragraphs and answer the most pressing ones. To address the decision, we were obviously pushing for and hoping for the complete overturning of the budget so we could go into immediate re-deliberations. But, they did not overturn the budget, and because of that we have officially been cut to near defunding.
However, the scare that started this entire process back in Spring Break was that these budgets would affect us for the next four years, and we didn’t know if The Observer could stay afloat for those four years until it could be re-deliberated. So although we have been nearly defunded, we now only face a year of budget uncertainty, and we are determined to and singularly focused on navigating the challenges that come.
That said, we are not out of the woods yet. Yes, The Observer is no longer at risk of shutting down completely, and that is a massive improvement from where we started. But we are still at risk of losing some of the aspects of our work that make us who we are. With this next year of near defunding our staffing future is uncertain, and our printing future even more so. Regardless of what happens next, it’s safe to say The Observer is going to be changing in the coming years, that was happening no matter what. But at the very least, there will still be an Observer, an Observer that will keep fighting to stay afloat as long as there are students running it.
