So you want to get more funding for the DRC and the CWC?

I was quite disappointed to see the feature Friday article from last week detail the blight of insufficient funding for the Disability Resource Center on campus. The article made reference to the decision by the local fee committee not to increase funding for the DRC back in October, which brought back a lot of bad memories, as it was that very same meeting in which the committee turned down an opportunity to increase funding to the Counseling & Wellness Center.

As you might recall, back when the news first broke about the decision, I wrote a rather aggressive letter to the editor lambasting the decision, and I received a notable amount of aggressive pushback from people who may not have fully understood how the committee worked. Now that The Alligator has brought attention to yet another consequence of that fateful meeting, I thought it would be fitting for me to talk about the local fee committee and how it exists in the context of funding the DRC, CWC and other entities on campus.

There is next to no information out there on the internet, but here is what I know about the committee to the best of my understanding. The committee is comprised of eight members: four faculty and four students. The Student Body president nominates the students in the summer, and the Senate confirms them. This past year, they all happened to be high-ranking members of the executive branch.

The committee approves or denies proposals in relation to various per-credit fee increases. If the committee approves a proposal, it goes to the university president for approval after consultation with the Student Body president with final approval by the University Board of Trustees, according to section 1009.24 (11) of the Florida Statutes.

Last October, the CWC and DRC both sent in proposals for fee increases in order to get more funding. The students on the committee voted down the proposals, among others. Their reasoning?

“Those who supported the motion to zero out all fee increase requests, do so under the notion that we as students believe that there is an alternative solution to fixing the lack of resources in each department without increasing the cost of tuition and fees. We believe that college affordability is of the utmost importance and decreasing the overhead on the health fee could resolve these issues with directly appropriating a larger proportion of these funds to the services they are intended to provide.”

So, clearly, the students had their own ideas to fix the issue, namely decreasing the overhead on the health fee. In brief, it’s a 13 percent charge by UF against all expenditures of auxiliary organizations such as the CWC and DRC. The money collected goes toward funding other parts of administration that don’t bring in money, such as public safety and human resources.

Essentially, the students voted against funding the CWC, DRC and other organizations because they wanted to try to get money another way. So what happened? Frankly, I have no idea. We certainly haven’t seen any front page news about either entities receiving more funding.

It is imperative for us to know what became of the executive branch’s effort to get increased funding for the CWC and DRC, because we all need to be on the same page in order to most effectively pursue alternate solutions.

I know no one wants to be the person who says, “It’s time to raise student fees,” but even if raising student fees is the last resort, we need to have transparency in order to know if it indeed is time to do so.

I’ve set up a meeting with the director of the CWC and the director of the DRC in order to get a better understanding of the funding sources of both entities to see if there are other solutions for us to pursue.

Questions, comments or concerns? Email me at: zchou@ufl.edu.

Zachariah Chou is a UF political science sophomore and Murphree Area Senator. His column focuses on Student Government.

Correction: A previous title of this column previously asked about funding for the CRC. This has been updated to reflect be it's the CWC.