The Martlet

The UVic Students’ Society’s (UVSS) financial future is looking a little brighter after students voted in favour of all five recent referenda.

The referenda questions, which were posed to students from Nov. 3–5, asked full-time students for a 40 cent increase per student each semester for three years to the operations fund, $4 per student to be moved from the capital fund to the operations fund, 50 cents per student per semester for special events, 90 cents per student per semester for an independent elections office and 95 cents per student per semester for UVic Pride. Seven per cent of students turned out to vote on these questions.

The changes will increase student fees by a total of $2.75 the first semester the new fees are implemented. After the end of the three-year period, student fees will have increased by $5.95.

The UVSS has accrued an accumulated debt of $370,000 over the past three years. According to chairperson James Coccola, this influx of funds will greatly improve the society’s finances.

“The one that I think was the most imperative was the one that didn’t cost students money because it would allow the UVSS to run without running a deficit,” he explained. “Right now we’re forced to run a deficit, even though we collect enough money to run the operations. The way it’s set up we can’t use all the money toward janitorial or wages or campaigns.”

That question passed with 80 per cent of students in favour. The one that passed with the closest margin was the fee for the independent elections office.

“That one passed with 54 per cent in favour, so it was a margin of about 80 votes that question passed by,” said Coccola. “We weren’t sure if it was going to pass but we’re glad that it did. It represents, hopefully, more stable elections in the future because we’ll be able to hire qualified professionals to run them.”

The next step, according to Coccola, is to reduce the administration fee on the UVSS health plan and set up long-term plans for debt reduction.

“We’re going to have to plan carefully so we don’t use all this money up in the first go,” he said. “People, if they see they have money, they might just decide to use it. But we don’t have money; we don’t have money yet. We have a lot of costs to consider. We have to look at reducing that over time.”

The UVSS had tried unsuccessfully to increase fees in the past few years.

“There were a number of reasons [these referenda passed]. I think it helped that we had dedicated fees — so fees . . . explained exactly where the money is going to . . . I think when students know exactly that the money is going to be spent on a particular issue, then that’s much easier for them,” said Coccola. “Also, we did it outside of elections, which means that there’s people around that are able to campaign, that are able to help out, and you’re not getting your message lost in the millions of other posters around talking about the elections.”

Coccola also feels students understood the desperate state UVSS finances are in.

“This was desperately needed and I think a lot of students realized the Student Society was facing — is still really facing — a crisis in terms of its finances,” he said.

Coccola hopes they will be able to get the fees approved by the UVic Board of Governors by January.

UVSS Director of Finance Kelsey Hannan estimates the referenda will mean an additional $65,000 for the UVSS next semester if the fees are approved in time.

“So there will be a little bit of elections cash that comes in next year that will be helpful,” he said. “There will also be events cash. It won’t be a lot. It’ll be a little less than half of what we would normally get fiscally.”

However, Hannan said the shift of $4 from the capital fund to the operations fund means a significant increase to operations.

“Now that’s not exactly money that’s just freed up, because it was money that students were already paying — it’s just been moved from one account to the other,” he explained, adding that the UVSS will now have to be more prudent with capital purchases. About $120,000 for the year will be moved from capital to operations.

“We can say roughly on the more conservative side of getting about $50,000 additional this fiscal year in the winter period for the capital adjustment alone,” said Hannan.

UVic Pride will also be receiving a significant financial boost, much of which will go towards renting a larger space in the Student Union Building (SUB).

“Not counting the part-time students, that comes to about $25,000 a semester. So that’s about $50,000 for two semesters, plus summer, which is hard to tell because there are way less students,” said Gabrielle Sutherland, constituency representative for UVic Pride on the UVSS board and official “yes” side for the Pride referendum question.

“It puts us on equal footing. It gives us representation. It gives us the ability to actually conduct our mandate,” she explained. “A lot of what we do, and a lot of what we’d like to do, is one-on-one peer support kind of thing, and we can’t do that in our space. So the bigger space means that we can do that.”

Sutherland said this will also allow Pride to potentially hire a paid co-ordinator and give the Collective freedom to decide other activities and events they’d like to put on.

The referendum to give Pride a dedicated fee passed with 59.3 per cent in favour.

“It wasn’t a big margin. It’s 200 votes, but really when you think about it it’s still pretty close,” said Sutherland. “I was a wreck during vote counting . . . At one point we were ahead by like, five votes. That is way more stressful than losing. It was close. But most of our votes, of course, came from the SUB.”

UVSS Chief Electoral Officer Shawn Slavin said all of the referendums ran very smoothly.

“Referenda from the standpoint of the elections office went very, very well. We had no issues,” he said. “This was an opportunity for us to really understand the referendum process, the issues that exist within the electoral policy manual surrounding referenda, and it will be a good starting point for really understanding how we need to conduct referenda within the UVSS.”

The referenda cost approximately $4,000, much lower than the estimated $12,000 to $15,000.

“We wanted to make sure that we were doing this very, very inexpensively. We decreased significantly the number of polling hours,” Slavin said. “Generally, with the actual elections, the vast majority of your costs are paying pollsitters for three days so we cut those hours more than in half which saved us almost $4,000.”

No complaints being made and less ballots to count than during an election also reduced time and therefore costs.