On Monday morning, Aditya Pai CMC ’13, ASCMC Vice President and President of the Senate, sent out an email to the Claremont McKenna student body that mentioned that during tonight’s Senate meeting, senators would hold a “discussion and vote on raising constitutional limits on ASCMC stipends.”

If the amendment passes as proposed, ASCMC will pay $3,300 more in stipends to its officers. Some of these officers are elected; some are appointed. Currently, ASCMC pays $16,700 in stipends; if the amendment passes, it will pay $20,000 in stipends. This will represent almost 6% of ASCMC’s budget.

Raising the constitutional limits on stipends means raising the maximum amount of money ASCMC Budget Committee may allocate to be paid to officers; in practice, it means raising their salaries. At last week’s Senate meeting, according to the minutes, which have not yet been posted publicly, senators discussed “Changing around payments for ASCMC Elected and Appointed Officials.”

CMC students who did not attend Senate last Monday had not been notified that these changes had been proposed until Pai’s 8:00 a.m. email Monday — less than 14 hours before the vote would be held.

To change stipend amounts, the Senate must pass a constitutional amendment. The proposed amendment that the Senate is considering tonight would technically only raise the maximum amount allowed to be paid out. But in practice the Budget Committee, which consists of most of the Executive Board and two senators, usually allocates the maximum.

In an email sent yesterday, only to ASCMC Senators, Pai attached a spreadsheet detailing the changes in stipend amounts.

Some of these changes are significant increases; one individual, the CMC Forum editor, will see his salary quadrupled.

• The Vice President will receive a $700 raise from $800 per year to $1500 per year.
• The CFO (Chief Financial Officer) will receive a $500 raise from $1000 per year to $1500 per year.
• The SAC (Social Affairs Chair) will receive a $500 raise from $700 per year to $1200 per year.
• The DAC (Dorm Affairs Chair) and SLC (Student Life Chair) will both receive $300 raises from $700 per year to $1000 per year.
• Class Presidents receive additional stipends, the Senior Class President moves from $700 per year to $900 per year, while the Freshman and Sophomore Class Presidents move from $400 per year to $500 per year.
• The stipend for the editor of the CMC Forum, who is an ASCMC officer, will be quadrupled from $200 to $800 per year. This change is the only one that will go into effect this school year, meaning current Forum editor Heath Hyatt CMC ’12 stands to earn $600 more than he agreed to when accepting the editorship.

Also, just for clarity, these stipends go to the officers themselves and are not at all tied to the allocations for any given committee or organization’s budget. The Forum will not receive an extra $600 for operation. The Dorm Activities fund will not go up $700.

Except for the Forum editor’s raise, the increased stipends would only be able to go into effect next year, meaning next year’s officers would be the ones to benefit. Even so, current senators and Board members who are not graduating and will likely fill those positions after Spring Break stand to gain if the stipend amounts are raised.

This change in stipends is not unprecedented. ASCMC has routinely increased its stipend amounts in the past to try to give officers compensation for the amount of work they put into their service that could otherwise be devoted to a paying job. ASCMC President Jessica Mao CMC ‘12 provided the Port Side a statement of why she supports the stipend increases citing inflation, evolving importance of certain positions, and last year’s $10 increase in student fees. Mao told the Port Side, however, that with the current stipend levels, ASCMC has had no trouble filling any positions. She also expressed hope that in future budgets, the additional $3,300 dollars in stipends would not come out of “clubs, dorms, class budgets, social chair budgets…but rather out of things like the contingency.”

ASCMC officers are already making plenty of money compared with student government officials at other schools. At Pitzer, student government officers work for zero compensation.

ASCMC President Jessica Mao CMC ’12 received $7,000 this year in stipend money from ASCMC. The Dean of Students Office matches what ASCMC pays its president, meaning Mao received a total of $14,000 this year. For the 2010-11 school year, the president of Pomona’s ASPC earned $1,500. At Scripps, that same year, the president of SAS earned $900 per semester, the maximum amount a student could otherwise make doing a work study job.

Perhaps this move was motivated by a desire to give other ASCMC officers more equitable pay in comparison to the president. If this is true, however, a cut to the president’s pay to offset the raises for other officers would seem more just. In 2010, a constitutional amendment to cut down the ASCMC president’s stipend to an amount closer to other ASCMC officers failed to pass. Mao told the Port Side, that during consideration of stipend changes, cutting the president’s pay “was discussed. We ended up not changing it.”

Last fall, the Port Side‘s Andy Willis CMC ’14 and Jeremy B. Merrill CMC ’12 investigated the ASCMC budget and provided CMC students with an interactive guide to how ASCMC spends our student fees. According to Lacey McLean CMC ‘12, ASCMC Chief Financial Officer, the funding for the proposed increases in stipends will come from ASCMC’s General Fund, which, she told the Port Side, is currently ”around $15,000 because of the increase in revenues.”

Last February, ASCMC voted to increase student fees by $10. If these stipend increases pass, about one quarter of last year’s student fee increase will be going directly into the pockets of ASCMC officials. Increasing stipends for officers was not cited as a justification for raising student fees at the time.

UPDATE 10:30pm: Senate approved the stipend changes. Every dorm voted for the measure except Claremont Hall, which abstained.

UPDATE 2/26: After lengthy discussion, the Executive Board decided to vote against most of the stipend increases with three exceptions. The stipend increases for the Forum editor-in-chief (a $600 increase this year for current editor Heath Hyatt CMC ’12 and for future Forum editors) and Social Affairs Chair (a $500 increase for future SACs) both passed with a 7-2 vote. The two nay votes came from Class of 2013 President Connor Barclay and Dorm Affairs Chair Clare Riva, who both told the Board that they were opposed to any stipend raises. The $100 decrease in the stipend for the Student Security Director passed with a 9-0 vote.

Jeremy B. Merrill contributed to this report

Russell M. Page, the Web Editor of the Port Side, is a junior at CMC from Albuquerque, NM. Page runs long distance for the CMS cross country and track teams. He also played rhythm guitar and sang lead in his punk rock band Emergency Ahead. He imports food from his native Land of Enchantment and smothers everything he eats in green chile.