The Students’ Administrative Council took nearly five hours to approve $60,000 worth of clubs’ funding at its Monday evening meeting. Representatives from individual clubs were forced to wait while the council slogged its way through the budgets of 42 individual campus groups.

The delay happened because some board members were not happy with the minutes from the Clubs Commission meetings, the SAC body that is responsible for approving clubs funding. Normally, budgets would be haggled over at the Clubs Commission and the final versions would be approved as a whole by the SAC board of directors. The time originally allotted to approving those minutes was one hour.

But when it came time to approve the minutes from the Clubs Commission meeting, a member put forth a motion to discuss the entire Clubs Commission meeting and re-open each of the clubs’ funding requests.

“I don’t feel comfortable not knowing more about the club,” said Monique Ferdinand, who made the motion.

Dylan Rae, vice-president of Student Life for SAC and the executive responsible for the Clubs Commission, said “It’s unfortunate; this is the second time it’s happened. Unfortunately people who should be coming to the Clubs Commission meeting aren’t… The questions that were asked should’ve been asked at the commission level.”

During the discussion the Board went over each club request one by one. They spent much of the time hearing the requests from the club members who had come to the meeting. Only the clubs that had members in the room were able to defend their funding requests.

Rini Ghosh, SAC President, took responsibility for the Clubs Commission minutes not being done as well as they could have, saying that one executive assistant is not able to do everything that one might think that they should. She also volunteered to take the notes herself in the future.

“I think I know why the Clubs Commission has the least amount of board members on it,” she said. “Because it’s the most boring.

“It was one of our campaign promises to increase the Clubs Commission budget,” Ghosh added. “It is the most important one because it deals directly with a lot of students.”

Rae compared the clubs’ funding requests to the frosh week orientation event at Canada’s Wonderland, which cost almost $40,000.

“SAC can spend all this money for an event that didn’t go over so well,” said a frustrated Rae, “yet they won’t spend money on clubs. It’s pretty shocking.”

Most of the clubs ended up getting all or most of the funding they had asked for.

Many of the Board members left because the meeting was taking longer than they had expected, so the remaining board members voted 14 to one, with six abstentions, in favour of granting the requests of the rest of the clubs.

“Today’s board meeting was the worst board meeting I’ve ever attended,” said board member Walied Khogali. “If this is what’s going to happen [at the] next board meeting I’m going to proxy my vote. This was not fair… I felt like I was held hostage.”

“I’ve never seen 100 people sit at a SAC meeting and just wait,” said Rae after the meeting. “That shows how dedicated these clubs are”.