At its final meeting on April 18, the Student Budget Committee (SBC) was able to fund all reasonable requests of the 33 student groups present, despite rumors that it was low on funding, according to SBC Chair Andrew Huynh ’11.

Rumors that the SBC was out of money as a result of mismanagement surfaced at the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) presidential debate. One student expressed concerns that he would be unable to receive funding for an upcoming program due to massive contributions to other groups earlier that year, particularly the Social Committee’s Matisyahu concert.

According to Huynh, the claim that the SBC lacked sufficient funding for student groups due to previous expenses this year is inaccurate.

“Yes, the SBC had a smaller budget since it was the last meeting of the year,” Huynh said. “However, that doesn’t mean we were out of money. At that meeting on Monday [April 18], we were able to provide funding to all reasonable student requests without being concerned about our budget.”

The SBC, a committee of the WSA, is responsible for allocating funds to University clubs and student groups. For the academic year, the SBC was provided $632,000 to distribute. Although the SBC was aware that it was approaching this cap and therefore had to be less flexible with funding, Huynh said the SBC was nonetheless capable of meeting the volume of requests at its final meeting.

According to Huynh, large allocations made earlier in the year, such as the one for the Matisyahu concert, did not impact the ability for subsequent student programs to receive funding.

“The SBC funds many expensive student programs,” Huynh said. “The Matisyahu concert was a big expense, but we were prepared for it in our budget. Otherwise we would not have given them funding.”

Although the SBC can confirm that it did not run out of funding, the committee is not yet able to determine what its surplus will be because unused money that was originally allotted to student groups over the course of year is returned to the SBC, Huynh said. The amount the SBC has in surplus will become available in late June. However, Huynh anticipates any surplus being smaller than last year, when it came in at approximately $68, 155.