The Anheuser Busch Auditorium was a writhing mass of consternation Wednesday night while the SGA debated, allocated and bickered their hearts out in the name of "fiscal responsibility."

The Student Government Association of Saint Louis University allocated $535,704.10 last night to 68 chartered student organizations. Last year, $511,911.75 was allocated, an increase of $23,792.35.

And it only took them nine hours and forty-five minutes to do so.

After a prayer led by Barney Barry, S.J. to the patron saint of desperate causes, the annual SGA funding meeting commenced in all its mundane glory.

The senators voted to omnibus the entire agenda and pulled in the points that they either wanted to clarify, amend or dispute.

The finance committee, composed of Financial Vice President Tom Gill, and Senators Patrick Ishmael, Jack Coatar, Christine Campbell, Charles Flint, Joe Cirillo, Jaime Nichols and Sheila Serra, sat on the dais and fielded the senators' and the students' questions.

The Association of Parks College Students was the first CSO to be granted funding, a total of $24, 271.21 divided among the various clubs contained within the title of APCS.

The APCS Allocation took over an hour to debate and rectify because of various discrepancies in the submitted budget. Several amendments were proposed and were all rejected.

Academic Vice President Jessica Cusick admonished the senators for their initial lack of allocating ingenuity.

"You're all looking at the finance committee with these doe eyes like 'What do you want to do Tom? What do you want to do, guys?' They're up there, they've done what they see fit, now it's your turn," Cusick said.

There was a lot of talk about the finance committee being the "black and white," and the senate at large being responsible for interpreting the "gray" areas of the allocation of funds; namely, how much each organization deserves.

"The groups should be fighting for their money next week, this is the time for the senators to fight for the clubs. I see a lot of the senators yielding to the groups," said Ishmael.

One of the aforementioned "gray areas" became even cloudier when the Melody of Praise debacle was broached.

Phil Lyons, vice president of student development, prefaced the discussion with a metaphor for the situation.

"If you're a creditor and you give some money to a debtor, the last thing you want is for the debtor to go bankrupt," said Lyons. "Melody of Praise owes SGA about $8,000. I'm under the impression that the finance committee allocated $0 based on that debt. I'd be willing to take that debt to student development. I don't think that the student activity fund should be shackled with this debt," said Lyons.

"I'm going to have to disagree," said Cirillo. "We're going to reward them by letting them go to the studio, record a CD and pay us back with it."

"I would be a little anxious about handing out $4,000 [for a CD] to an organization that has already defaulted once," said Will Dreiling, Arts and Sciences senator.

Lyons said that the University never made the order for the 1,125 polo shirts that the order was made on behalf of the Midwest Gospel Ensemble by a student in Melody of Praise.

"The shirts were not ordered for the University, so there was no purchase order. The shirts were delivered with the Melody of Praise t-shirts, which were all ordered from Derek Weber of Weber enterprises," said Lyons.

When the projected attendance fell short for the concert, it was too late for Melody of Praise to cut the number of shirts ordered because they had already been printed.

"Our biggest mistake was taking delivery of the t-shirts," said Lyons. "The University became liable when we physically took the shirts and then tried to sell them…But when we accepted those shirts, it became our issue."

"Personally I have a problem with passing off our problem to student development, we're grown-ups, we need to handle it," said President Meister.

"They have debt, so essentially we're saying we're going to bail them out. Next question, are we just going to let this pass or are we going to deal with what somebody else did," said Cirillo. "The most important question, what kind of message are we sending to other CSOs? Go ahead and get as many liabilities as you like, we'll take care of it. We'll deal with it. We should not accommodate misappropriations."

The senate decided to wait until next week to decide on whether or not Melody of Praise will get funding for next year.

"Goodwill doesn't pay for shirts," said Ishmael.

At least one group was given allocation with little protest, although they had to wait eight hours to explain themselves. SLUTV was given $16,136 for new video equipment for-filming and editing-to improve their quality and capabilities.

"We have one editing computer. It's a really nice computer, but anyways," said Andrew Clifton, freshman and future president of SLUTV.

Several student organizations, including SLU Crew and Pt. Stu Co., did not receive their allocations last night because of poor or erroneous budgets. They will be revising their budgets to present the accurate versions at next week's appeals.

At the end of the meeting, Tom Gill voiced his concern about the allocations voted on and passed for the BSA. The senate allocated $15,219.81 for the organization. An insufficient sum, considering it took BSA more than that to bring Angela Davis to campus for Black History Month, Gill said.

Two new amendments were passed, one to allocate $5,250 that had been cut by the finance committee, and another $3,500, bringing BSA's total allocation to $23,969.81.

The marathon meeting was the longest in SGA history.