USG yet to complete donation to Pace Center

Correction appended

The USG has not yet made its donation of $90,000 to the Pace Center, several USG representatives told The Daily Princetonian on Tuesday, adding that the transfer of funds would occur by the end of October.

“To date, none of the funds have been spent and no final decisions [about how to spend the donation] have been made,” Pace Center Executive Director Kiki Jamieson said in e-mail. She and other Pace Center affiliates declined to comment, though, on whether the USG’s $90,000 donation will bring the center’s operating budget to the level of the previous fiscal year.

Last April, the student body passed referenda to donate USG funds normally allocated to Lawnparties events and other USG pilot projects to the Pace Center, which oversees several campus civic-engagement initiatives.

One reason for the apparent delay of the donation is that part of the funds to be given away are still being used to pay bills for past USG events, USG treasurer Trevor Martin ’11 said.

“We’re just making sure there are no more outstanding charges before donating the money,” he noted.

Martin explained that one of the spending guidelines proposed over the summer by the USG and the Pace Steering Committee, which will distribute the funds, requires that the Pace Center use the donation as quickly as possible, preferably within this academic year.

So far, though, only tentative plans for spending the USG donation exist. A meeting will likely be held next week to finalize how campus civic-engagement groups will use the funds, Nurkin said.

Jamieson told the ‘Prince’ last April that the center’s program budget was going to be slashed by 82 percent in the wake of budget cuts, but she later retracted that statement, saying instead that the cuts would be consistent with University-wide constraints.

Jamieson added that the Pace Steering Committee will distribute and use the donation in ways that will make Princeton students more aware of the effects of the economic crisis beyond the University, as well as benefit service-oriented Princeton students and student groups.

In addition to delineating the activities to be funded by the USG donation, The Steering Committee has given itself an “unofficial deadline” to spend the money within the academic year, Steering Committee member Jane Yang ’11 explained.

Martin said that the USG’s donations to University bodies won’t necessarily continue after the money is given to the Pace Center.

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“We can’t just donate to a soup kitchen,” he explained. “It actually has to benefit students in some way ... As of now, next semester, the USG will have a Lawnparties activity.”

Correction

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a quote made by Jane Yang '11 to Pace senior program coordinator Andrew Nurkin. That version also stated that Jamieson told the ‘Prince’ last April that the center’s budget was going to be slashed by 82 percent in the wake of budget cuts, in fact, Jamieson said only that the center's program budget would be cut by 82 percent.