“I’m happy that the activity fee recommendation was accepted,” Grand Marshal Mike Borzumate said. “Having it passed at this point in the calendar allows us to bring it to the trustee’s meeting with the rest of the budget.”

The numbers approved by the Senate show an increase of 4.48 percent for undergraduate students and 3.46 percent for graduates. The increases reflect large changes in major budget items such as an increase in the number of clubs using Union resources, increases in athletics personnel, equipment, insurance, and decreasing income from areas such as the bookstore.

In addition, the expected size of the student body is dropping. Last year’s activity fee packet projected that the number of students on campus at this time would be 5,930, but the actual number is 5,835. Current admissions projections for next year estimate that the incoming class will be approximately 1,200 strong, while the graduating class this year is around 1,300 students. In response to this, the Activity Fee Subcommittee projected that the total number of activity-fee paying students next year will be 5,750; the overall raise in the activity fee reflects this decrease.

In debating the activity fee this year, both the Senate and E-Board discussed allegations brought by freshmen Douglas Kingman and Robert Fishel. The two serve on the Senate and Judicial Board, respectively, in addition to being co-founders of the RPI College Republicans, and brought concerns about budgeting to the E-Board before the final copy of the activity fee recommendation was prepared.

The activities and clubs that Fishel and Kingman alleged were in violation of budgeting policy included the Black Students Alliance’s celebration of Kwanzaa, which they called a religious ceremony; the Rifle Club’s registration with the National Rifle Association, which they called a political affiliation; Ecologic’s attendance of several conferences which endorse a particular political viewpoint; the Pride Alliance’s subscription to magazines such as Out and The Advocate, which “frequently discuss political issues;” and the Muslim Women Association’s trip to a leadership conference sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The E-Board devoted several hours of their last meeting to the allegations, and the Senate spent much of one meeting discussing the issue before adjourning and holding a special meeting devoted to it last Friday. The E-Board solicited input from the accused clubs’ Student Activity Resource Persons and the clubs’ officers before debating the allegations. In the end, it prevented the Rifle Club from affiliating with the NRA, concluded that the RMWA would not attend a conference sponsored by a religious organization, and decided that any event Ecologic attended would have to be approved by the board before they went.

Fishel and Kingman said that the clubs were in violation of a 1996 Senate resolution that barred the Executive Board from funding political and religious clubs, and establishing itself as the sole political voice of the student body. It was passed following 15 months of surveys of RPI students and investigations into other schools’ policies.

The measure was passed at that point “because there was a preponderance of off-campus organizations that were really shell organizations that wanted access to student activity fee funds,” said Director of the Union Rick Hartt.

At present, the E-Board is denying funding to such groups as the College Republicans because of the policy, but Fishel said at the board’s meeting last week that he thought the concerns he and Kingman had raised showed that the measure was unenforceable.

At the special meeting, several senators discussed their disappointment that the activities in question slipped passed the E-Board’s oversight.

“I thought it was the job of the Executive Board to make sure everything was clean,” said Class of 2004 Senator Jose Benitez. “It took people from outside of the E-Board to find this out, and I am really let down.”