The Departmentally Related Activities Committee (DRAC), which is responsible for allocating thousands of dollars worth of student fees, is meeting with the Associated Students Board of Directors Tuesday to move past a history of disagreement.

The meeting will address miscommunications and rushed legislature over the committee’s governance charter, stemming from the sudden disbandment of the University Services Council more than a year ago.

In hopes to amend the sudden loss, the AS Board passed a charter June 3 that vested much of the governing power in their own hands, without the full consent of DRAC.

However, in a meeting Sept. 22 between Matt Jarrell and Western’s Assistant Attorney General Wendy Bohlke, the passed charter was found to be incongruent with Washington state law regarding mandatory student services and activities fees and who holds the power to govern them.

The law implies the AS Board and DRAC are separate entities competing for the same funds.

“The question was if the AS was asserting some responsibility over DRAC they really didn’t have,” Bohlke said. “And I think that’s probably the case.”

Since last spring, when five-years worth of the student technology fee—a total of  $630,000—was misplaced by the university administration, the AS Board has advocated for transparency and heavy student involvement wherever student money is spent.

And this includes DRAC, which distributes fees for departmental activities in four main areas: music, theater arts, communication and journalism. Some specific recipients include Western’s debate team, student publications and the dance program.

Virgilio Cintron, AS vice president for business and operations, contacted DRAC in spring 2009 to review the committee’s budget process, advocating for that same transparency and student involvement.

Subsequently, Cintron proposed a draft charter outlining certain aspects of how he believed the committee ought to be governed and operated. DRAC and the AS Board met together June 3 to discuss this charter.

 “[The AS Board] represents the students, and they represent what happens with student money. That’s appropriate,” DRAC Chair Steve Woods said. “It’s just the demands and the approach they took were not as cooperative as they seem to think that they are.”

Woods said DRAC and the AS Board agreed in the June 3 meeting to continue working on a compromise charter in the fall, but the AS Board went ahead and passed their charter despite major disagreements.

The most impactful disagreement, Woods said, was that the AS Board wanted their vice president of activities to take on the chair position of DRAC as a non-voting member. 
Committee members resisted because of the overall power the chair has to set agendas, again propagating a conflict of interest between the two entities.

“The AS is a recipient of the fees,” Bohlke said. “So they are in competition; but it’s a friendly competition because they are all there to serve students in different ways.”

An existing process was already in place for the AS Board to review budgets when all recipients of the services and activities fee come together to present spending proposals each spring to the Services and Activities Fee Committee, which is made up mainly of student representatives.

“When [the fee committee] was set up it was meant to put students in the driver’s seat for putting their budget proposals together, and it was meant to be representative,” Bohlke said.

And the more critical aspect of the entire budget process is transparency, she said, because the bottom line is that students need to know where their money is being spent.

“I am very confident that they will be able to work it out because they are good people with good intentions,” she said. “And well-intentioned people will work these things out.”

Jarrell said bringing concerns to DRAC was justified and is part of the responsibility of the AS Board, but the way in which it was done last spring in relation to the DRAC charter was rushed and not completely checked out, mainly due to board members closing out their projects at the end of the school year.

However, Cintron contends they had not rushed the process, but had “fundamental disagreements” with the charter DRAC was operating under.

A charter, drawn up by DRAC budget coordinator Ted Sealy this summer, will be presented in the upcoming meeting. The charter has transparency, student oversight and reportage to the fee committee as top priorities, Jarrell said.

“In the end, we all have our hearts in the right place in representing and serving students,” Jarrell said. “And that’s the common ground it took a while to find.”

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