BoG Grub

Governors Cost $300 a Meeting to Feed

NewsCorey Pool — Published April 3, 2012

Once a month, Concordia’s Board of Governors and a handful of student representatives meet in a room in the EV Building to discuss the university’s internal issues.

From September 2011 to Jan. 31, 2012 a total of five BoG meetings took place. Through documents obtained from an Access to Information request, The Link can report that the university spent a total of just over $2,400 to facilitate them.

Over the five meetings, Concordia spent just over $1,400 on “refreshments” for the approximately 30 people in attendance, the largest expenditure on the bill, which averages out to just shy of $300 per meeting.

“To put things into perspective, we rarely spend more than $100 on food for CSU Council meetings, and those are also once a month,” said Concordia Student Union President Lex Gill. “That’s usually enough pizza or burritos or falafel for about 40 people.”

In contrast, the university only allotted about one quarter of the cost of refreshments to Instructional and Information Technology Services and audiovisual equipment, which would facilitate the over-flow room.

In total, $350 was spent on IITS, or an average of roughly $70 per meeting.

“One person will go up and set up a projector and one or two wireless microphones, but it won’t go much further than that,” said an IITS technician about the standard procedure.