U of T’s Students’ Administrative Council spent $32,000 on a frosh week trip to Paramount Canada’s Wonderland, The Varsity has learned, and not $240,000, as was reported by other campus media last week.
The incident has been embarrassing for SAC, as executives squabbled publicly over the widely disputed amounts spent on the event. The amount of cash expended has declined significantly, but the expenditure of vitriol within the famously fractious organization escalated over the weekend.
During the 2004 Frosh Week festivities, SAC and radio station VIBE 91.9 jointly presented a concert for U of T students at Wonderland and provided discounted tickets to the Toronto-area theme park. According to its contract with Wonderland, SAC had initially planned on selling 7,500 tickets; the final number was actually around 3,000. When SAC received invoices from Wonderland for the cost of the tickets, the total cost appeared to be $240,000.
These receipts were leaked to the student press by anonymous executives within SAC; VP Student Life Dylan Rae presented them at an acrimonious SAC board meeting on November 10.
In an interview with The Varsity, Rae, whose portfolio of Student Life includes responsibility for running Frosh Week, said that as early as August 4 he had decided that SAC should cancel the Wonderland venture. Rae’s signature, however, appears on the June 29 contract SAC signed with Wonderland, just over a month previous.
“Nobody was organized; we had no artists booked and barely any tickets sold. We had about a month to go until we had to put this show on. I told them at the meeting I thought this was going to be a disaster, but I was overruled.”
Although he signed the contract with Wonderland, Rae said he had trouble tracking down the invoices that arrived later in the fall.
“I had to run around from person to person just to get information on the receipts, and I couldn’t even get the information legitimately,” he said. After three months of seeking answers and solid numbers Rae said that the receipts “were actually left in my mailbox anonymously. I had to repeatedly ask for them in meeting after meeting and it had to come to that to get any kind of numbers.” So what exactly happened?
“The invoice getting leaked out to the press was very hurtful,” said SAC President Ranjini Ghosh, “because it was a preliminary number. It led some students to believe we lost more money than we actually did.”
According to a SAC press release issued over the weekend, the total amount paid to Wonderland was $54,390, while revenue totaled about $23,000, meaning a loss of about $31,000. The changes were made because Wonderland had made a billing mistake in its first set of invoices, and because SAC was able to return more than 4,000 unused tickets.
“Friday night at our emergency executive meeting, [VP UTM] Moneeza Ahmed and [VP Operations] Lisa Aldridge presented the final Wonderland expenses,” said Ghosh. “They showed us some final receipts after refunding the last of the tickets and we lost $31,172.”
“The numbers may have changed but everything else remains the same,” said Rae when The Varsity talked to him after the corrected figures were publicized. “Because the bottom line is that it’s still a loss of over $30,000 that’s not going to go to clubs or students if they need it, and to be honest I don’t know if these are the final numbers because there are still some outstanding tickets lying around with Innis College.
“Initially they said 7,000 would show up but it was probably closer to 700.”
Ghosh said that the event was a success.
“We spent this money on Wonderland, but it was also one of our most successful parties as long as I’ve been on campus, and I’ve been here six years. About 4,000 students came and no one complained about not having a good time. The way I look at it, we didn’t lose money on Wonderland; we invested it in students on campus.” Ghosh also added that “VIBE was supposed to [raise] around $30,000 in sponsorship money and if they had, we wouldn’t be in the hole. They didn’t keep their end of the bargain financially, but they did a terrific job in organizing the whole show. The amount of this loss was very good compared with other years. We’re not in the hole as much as we thought we were last week. We chose to be corporate-free and I think we did a wonderful job.”
Not so wonderful, however, was the atmosphere at SAC, as executives and board members sniped at each other last week.
“It is unfortunate that Rae could not discern which was the correct invoice, or the details of the contract that he signed on SAC’s behalf,” Ahmed was quoted as saying in a November 20 press release. An “orientation volunteer,” Nida Shams, was also quoted in the statement: “If Mr. Rae was so concerned about the financing of the Wonderland event-why didn’t he take the time to confirm that the invoice he has begun to circulate was accurate?” The statement called Rae’s actions “careless” and asked him to be “more prudent in his future concerns about SAC’s finances.”
Rae doesn’t believe he jumped to any conclusions.
“The fact that the president doesn’t see this as a serious problem,” said Rae in response to the press release, “is a problem. If they were so concerned with the [accuracy of the] numbers, why didn’t they answer my questions a month ago?
“Whether it’s $30,000, $50,000, or $100,000, it’s a waste.”
