By Tejal Patel

Student Government Association president, Pete DiSilvio, has added $12,192 to the association’s contingency budget.

The contingency budget is used by the appropriations committee to give money to clubs at the University. According to DiSilvio, the contingency budget had approximately $5,000 left in it and was not enough to cover the clubs that had been asking for more money. Therefore, he took a look at the SGA budget lines and cut as much money as he could from them.

The SGA budget lines are similar to the budget proposals made by clubs. They include all of the different things that SGA spends money on. Over the course of the year, money gets deducted as it is spent. After looking through the budget lines, DiSilvio rounded all of the numbers and cut the excess money out. All of this money then went into the contingency budget.

DiSilvio felt the need for this addition because he did not want clubs to continue hurting financially. “I’m not [going to] sit here and let clubs go under, under my tenure here,” said DiSilvio.

He also took a large amount of money back from events that have already occurred. These “special events” include Homecoming, Sinterklaas, elections and conferences.

DiSilvio said there is more money to come because SGA committees are presently auditing themselves. He is hoping to cut as much money out of the committees’ budgets as possible and add that to the contingency budget as well.

“I figure we ask clubs to take cuts all the time, so we have to take a cut,” DiSilvio said. Any club that comes to the appropriations meeting has a chance at receiving some of this extra money.

After the addition of this money, the contingency budget is at approximately $17,192.