Brianna Campbell / The Collegian

Due to reduced revenue from the spring semester’s closed enrollment, the Associated Students, Inc. (ASI) approved their revised budget Wednesday, a month into the semester.

The ASI budget for 2009-10 approved in April of this year had to be revised due to this summer’s announcement by the Board of Trustees, according to ASI’s vice president of finance and chief financial officer Lauren Johnson.

“That’s almost $100,000 cut, because of the enrollment,” Johnson said.

In April, ASI projected more than $660,000 in total net revenue for the year, and has since revised that amount to $573,000.

Johnson said ASI wanted to cut as much internal cost as possible, but student programs were inevitably cut.

“When you’re dealing with employee expenses, that’s generally a fixed cost,” Johnson said. “The fact that we’re able to cut it at all is pretty impressive, I think.”

One large cut from student services that has already affected some students was from the reduction in club and organization funding. It fell from $85,000 to $57,000.

Along with the cuts in club funding, ASI made a change to the funding guidelines. Clubs can now receive $2,000 from ASI, whereas the previous guideline allowed $4,000.

“Now that we’ve cut it [to $57,000] I think it’s really important we made that subsequent cut to the funding guidelines,” said Johnson.

One-third of the cuts affected the readership program. The program offers free newspapers to students.

“Instead of really [cutting] back on our New York Times and Fresno Bee, which have a really high consumption, we just dropped USA Today,” Johnson said. “It was a hard decision, but that was about a $30,000 savings.”

The revised budget was passed with the necessary two-thirds vote, despite some protestations from senators.

“I wanted to thoroughly review any information before we voted,” ASI senator Pedro Ramirez said.

Ramirez said he wanted to view a more detailed line-by-line breakdown. He said that if the ASI revenue continues to go down, it would have to continue to make revisions. He wanted to find further cuts now.

One area, total operations expenses, went up by more than $2,000. ASI President Jessica Sweeten said that those expenses are necessary, because they cover travel expenses that will be used to lobby for education.

“This problem is because the state is not valuing higher education,” Sweeten said.

Sweeten said that it is not unusual to pass a budget this late in the semester, especially with the changes in enrollment this year.