The race for comptroller will pit two members currently on the Student Association finance board, which divvies out the approximately $1.6 million dollars collected from the annual $144.50 student fee.

Darius Pakrooh, a sophomore accounting and finance major is serving his first semester on the finance board, but he says he already has a defined direction for what he wants to do as the board’s leader.

Pakrooh believes smaller organizations are not getting the amount of funding they need to function and bring a diversity of voices needed at the school.

‘You do need a balance between the large organizations and the small organizations,’ Pakrooh said. ‘It brings a balance, it brings a sense of diversity to Syracuse University and its programming. To be honest, I feel like it is a little biased toward larger organizations.’

Pakrooh wants to give every organization a fair shake at funding by giving every organization more individual contact with the finance board and evaluating them individually, bringing a closer relationship between the organization and the finance board while giving the smaller organizations more of a voice.

On top of increased communication between the student organizations and the finance board, Pakrooh would also like to increase the communication with the student body by sending out a brief e-mail periodically, updating the ideas of organizations and their plans. He also wants to increase communication between organizations to have ‘mini-mixers,’ where organizations meet to see how they can better cooperate with programming and spread out costs.

He also stressed the importance of reducing costs associated with Student Centers and Programming Services, which charges programming fees for such logistical services as renting out Goldstein Auditorium and setting up microphones for events.

Andrew Urankar, a junior marketing and retail major, wants to do more to increase funding coming into student groups. He has been a member of SA’s finance board since late 2003, serving his second semester.

Urankar believes there are already terrific ideas coming from student organizations, but funding is just too limited.

To combat this, Urankar wants to approach the problem from both directions, having student groups work together to cut down on programming costs and pool their resources, while at the same time actively pursuing extra funding from the university. He believes his larger amount of experience will help in this regard.

‘There is no scenario where too much experience is a bad thing,’ Uranker said. ‘Especially when you’re working with so many people in the university, experience is a great thing.’

Outgoing Comptroller Maggie Misztal believes both candidates are capable of handling the job, but she was quick to praise Pakrooh’s attendance at all finance board meetings so far this semester. She also thought a focus on working to spread funding between groups would be the best way to go about dealing with financial constraints, instead of approaching the university for additional funding.

‘With all the politics that that have gone into play, you really need to work internally with the organization,’ Misztal said. ‘There needs to be continued efforts to work within the organizations.’

She also warned that skyrocketing costs with SCPS could eventually severely hamper efforts to fund student organizations.

‘The rising SCPS costs need to be addressed,’ Misztal said.

Whichever candidate wins, Misztal warned they would face a tough task at a thankless job.

‘It’s a living nightmare,’ she said. ‘I told both of them, expect to give up a lot, expect to have people bitch at you, expect to be called a racist … They both could probably perform the job.’

Published on November 7, 2004 at 12:00 pm