Today's Last Day of Classes celebration will run on borrowed money.
At its weekly meeting Tuesday night, the Duke University Union executive board voted to subsidize the LDOC planning committee's debt of approximately $12,000 by withdrawing the amount from DUU's reserve fund. The loan was preliminarily approved Monday morning by the University Union Board, DUU's oversight body.
"We thought they only needed about $10,000 [at last Tuesday's meeting] and that they would easily get the rest of it covered, but that didn't happen," said DUU President Zachary Perret, a junior. "The temporary solution we discussed with UUB is to give them the money and let them pay us back next year. It's a crappy solution, but it's a solution."
He said this amount was essential to LDOC because it will be used to pay for labor and groundskeeping but said DUU had the option of doing nothing.
He added that if the vote had failed, the LDOC committee would have been forced to borrow money from the Office of Student Activities and Facilities at a high interest rate, an outcome that would have placed a significantly larger financial burden on next year's LDOC planning committee.
DUU Major Attractions Director Liz Turner, a junior, said DUU should ease the debt of future LDOC committees as much as possible, adding that she supported the DUU subsidy.
"I know there's the option of us not giving them the money, but the budget of LDOC next year is already going to have to be decreased to pay back the loan," she said. "From a student perspective, LDOC is something that affects every student, and I feel like it would be better for us to do it than for them to take it out from OSAF."
WXDU Director Marc Loeffke, a sophomore, proposed an alternative payment plan that would have allowed the LDOC committee to pay back the loan over a span of two years, softening the immediate impact of the deficit.
"If it's going to decrease their budget next year by a lot, maybe we should allow them to pay $6,000 each year over two years instead of $12,000 next year so it isn't as big of a hit," he said.
However, DUU members said they were reluctant to adopt a drawn-out payment plan because of the possibility future committees will also exceed their budget. The proposal did not pass.
Although the Union agreed to provide the loan--which they expect next year's LDOC committee to pay back-members said they wanted to avoid setting a precedent for future years.
"One of the problems was this idea that going over budget wasn't a huge problem," Perret said. "I think LDOC will get a little bit more scrutiny next year because of this."
Freshman Julia Hawkins, director of Joe College Day, said the LDOC committee should have been able to remain within its sizable budget, citing DUU committees as similar groups that must also contend with limited financial resources.
"You can do a lot with a little. It just comes to picking a good committee and picking a good chair," she said. "We all operate under budgets.... There's no reason that LDOC can't."
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