Editor:
While I am grateful to see that ASUA President Trujillo took the time to speak on this issue ("Graduate ponder split from ASUA," March 28), once again his math doesn't add up. He is quoted to say that the Graduate and Professional Student Council pays $14,500 in stipends and the Undergraduate Senate only pays out $7,700 during the year.
The GPSC pays $400 stipends to each representative out of its budget and $800 stipends to the GPSC President and Vice President. The other four officers do not get any stipends from the GPSC budget, as we have successfully secured funding for GPSC officers from other sources for the last two years. The council currently has 24 seats, one of which was open for part of this year. The upshot is that our estimated expenditures for GPSC stipends is less than $8,800 [(18 X $400)+(2 X $800)].
The Undergraduate Senate pays $1,100 stipends for its eight members for a total of $8,800.
In addition, three members of each body receive $550 for the privilege of meeting with ASUA President Trujillo once a week in the Central Coordinating Council.
It might be that ASUA President Trujillo was including in his attribution of our stipend structure the salaries we paid the director and a staff-member of Student Showcase, for which we matched work-study funding. If that is the case, then maybe we should roll into Trujillo's stipend and his staff's stipends, and then realize that we could really save a lot more money around ASUA by eliminating his position instead of following his and Sgt. Seastone's proposal to eliminate the GPSC for financial reasons . or maybe their real reason is because it's just "payback" to us for daring to ask Trujillo to recalculate his mathematical errors during the budgetary problems we've had with him over the last yearÄ the only legislation this year for which there was a "three to four week delay."
Matthew Troth
GPSC Vice-President