CUTV to continue funding The Breach
Members voted to continue sending funds to the incubation project at a special general meeting
At a CUTV special general meeting (SGM) on Dec. 5, a majority of members voted to strike down a motion to cancel the last installment of $50,000 to be paid out to The Breach.
This payment agreement with the incubation project was originally laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that CUTV’s board of directors approved on April 7, 2021.
In the nearly four hour meeting, three student members and five community members were also elected to the board of directors during the SGM.
The hybrid event kicked off with nearly twice as many participants on Zoom as there were in person. The night was also punctuated by allegations of a coordinated effort to register new members supportive of The Breach and questions about inadequate funding for equipment upgrades.
The motion to opt out of the funding agreement was voted against almost three hours into the night, with 52 votes against and 25 votes in favour. The motion couldn’t be voted on at the CUTV annual general meeting (AGM) on Nov. 4, as it was adjourned prior to the vote following a call to recount quorum.
Member Mobilization
Leanna Gelston, a CUTV student board member between 2018 and 2019, told The Link that she was disappointed in the outcome of the SGM, as she believes that CUTV should use the funding to purchase new equipment.
“I knew they were going to get their community of people who support The Breach,” Gelston said. “No matter how old [they] are, no matter what relevance [they] have to Concordia, they're just going to get them to come and vote.”
According to documents obtained by The Link, a minimum of 20 new community members have signed up since the last AGM.
Vincent Stephen-Ong, a CUTV community member of nearly 10 years, opposed the continuation of funding. He said that he believed the focus of the SGM became a referendum on The Breach rather than on the needs of CUTV.
“The many people on Zoom were co-opted into doing this because I believe that they were given limited information,” Stephen-Ong said. He added that he believes the reasons why some members opposed CUTV’s funding of The Breach were not clearly communicated to them.
Dru Oja Jay, executive director of CUTV and publisher of The Breach, told The Link that he believed the funding and incubation of The Breach has value to both Concordia students and others.
“This was an opportunity to take, ultimately, a relatively small amount of money, in the scheme of student union spending overall, and turn it into a national institution that is self-sustaining,” Jay said, adding that The Breach has mentored and hired many Concordia graduates as staff writers.
CUTV equipment needs
Many members said that they felt CUTV needed to prioritize investing in upgrading and maintaining its equipment and computer systems.
Aida Karkas, a film production alumna, has been using the CUTV equipment depot since 2019. According to her, she and her collaborators were recently given faulty sound equipment on more than one occasion.
“We were doing a podcast and one of the boom [microphones] didn't work. So we had a shitty sound on one person and a really good sound on the other,” said Karkas, who emphasized the need for CUTV to set a higher equipment budget.
Karkas wasn’t the only one with concerns about equipment. Gelston, who said she now works in the camera and set department for the visual effects company DNEG, said that CUTV needs to upgrade their camera gear and editing software.
“I've been looking at the site, just to see what's there and their stuff doesn't look great,” Gelston said. “It looks like the exact same stuff I had when I was there four years ago, five years ago.”
Jay said at the SGM that he acknowledged the need for upgrading the equipment. He said that, in the current fiscal year, CUTV has budgeted $30,000 for equipment funding in partnership with L’Organe, a French student media collective at Concordia University.
“I can certainly recognize as the executive director that the equipment funding has suffered relative to what was before,” Jay said. “But, we also do recognize [equipment funding] as a priority, and I think the outgoing board recognizes [it] as a priority.”
Confusion with financial statements
Apart from equipment funding, members at the SGM also raised questions and concerns regarding the lack of clarity around money transferred to The Breach from CUTV.
Val Masny, who made an unsuccessful bid to be elected as a community board member, pointed out how CUTV’s audited financial statements showed that an additional $54,000 was transferred to The Breach.
Jay acknowledged that the financial statements were confusing and “certainly suboptimal.” He explained that the discrepancy was because CUTV and The Breach shared a bank account for over two years before a closeout agreement that separated the two.
“For the first two years of existence, the Breach was a project of CUTV and so you have a situation where all of Breach’s assets were part of CUTV’s bank accounts,” Jay said. “That included the MOU amounts and also included all the sustainer revenues from CU—sorry, from The Breach—[that was] coming to CUTV accounts for the first little while and then, gradually, it was separated.”
Karkas believes that more time at the SGM should have been spent on explaining the financial statements since not everybody was familiar with accounting concepts.
“I just didn't have time to process the information of what was going on,” Karkas said. “It was going too quick for my liking.”
Jay told The Link that The Breach didn’t receive any money beyond the amounts laid out in the MOU. But, he said that certain CUTV employees, including himself, worked partially for The Breach while drawing salaries from CUTV.
“[A]t the end of the day when all the accounts are closed the only thing it's going to be over and above the amount that's in the MOU will be effectively an in-kind donation of my time […] and a bunch of other CUTV employees provided in-kind labour,” Jay said.
