Though $14 per semester might not seem like much, multiply it by about 40,000 students and it can go a long way.

The SORF, or Student Organization Resource Fee, is a refundable fee of $14 per semester. The fee goes into a fund which can provide Registered Student Organizations on campus with money for various activities, as well as providing Student Legal Services and the Tenant Union with all of their funding, said Charles Blatti, graduate student and member of the SORF board.

While students can collect a refund, they will not be able to use Student Legal Services if they have done so.

The money is distributed by the SORF board, which is made up of eight students who run for the position as well as three faculty members.

Blatti said the group reviews about 70 applications every two weeks. He said the process can take upward of five hours every other Thursday night.

While any RSO can apply for funding, Blatti said the decision to allocate funds is based more on rules and guidelines than how the members of the board feel about the particular activity. For instance, the board decides how important it feels funding travel is as opposed to funding speakers and makes decisions based on that criteria, not whether they feel funding travel for a sports organization is more important than funding a cultural trip.

Requests usually fall under three main categories: speakers, travel and equipment.

The board submits their recommendations to the University, which has the final say over how the money is spent. The system is reminiscent of the checks and balances in the U.S. government, said Chris Yoon, sophomore in LAS and SORF board member. He said the University usually does not take issue with the board’s recommendations.

“The only problem is the vice chancellor actually has the final say,” he said. “We can’t really vote on it if she vetoes it.”

During the fall semester, the SORF board allocated $523,497.92 out of a total $988,996.04 requested by RSOs. Only $230,241.69, however, ended up being paid out.

Yoon said the board usually does not fund the entire amount requested in order to promote responsible spending.

The discrepancy between the amount allocated and the amount paid comes from RSOs either deciding not to go through with the planned activities or not bringing back proper documentation of expenses, such as receipts from hotel stays, Blatti said.

“It is a larger issue than we’re comfortable with,” he said, adding that the board is working on increasing knowledge among RSOs that the fund exists for their use, as well as enabling more organizations to collect what they are allocated.

“If we’re only getting 30 percent of the RSOs, it’d be nice if SORF was more on the front of the mind of members of RSOs,” he said.

SORF was created in 1978 as a way to fund Student Legal Services, as well as the Tenant Union and student organizations.

Thomas Betz, director of Student Legal Services, said having SORF gives the office more predictability and stability in funding, which allows the office to operate. Student Legal Services submits a budget to the board for three-year periods in order to create additional stability.

Refunding the fee

Betz said the office “leverages” the fee because it cannot help students who have taken a refund. However, he said that the office still helps students who do not require legal assistance through education about things such as Spring Break scams and keg laws, as well as improving landlord-tenant relations.

“There is no question that our office and the Tenant Union have had a major impact in this community regarding the behavior of landlords,” he said.

“I’ve been here 24 years and I can tell you things have gotten better because we’re here … (landlords) had to be taught lessons by litigation.”

The office gives free legal counseling to students and its three attorneys will also go to court for students – a big benefit from such a small fee, Betz said. He said hiring an attorney will set students back hundreds or thousands of dollars.

He added that he has students who have taken a refund come into his office every week, and they’re usually crying.

“They’ve (gotten a refund) on a day so that they can go out drinking on a Friday night. I understand that, I was a student too,” he said. “That Friday night, they get busted. They come in Monday wanting to use the service, and the problem is we can’t (help them).”

Betz said students who think they can represent themselves in court are mistaken.

“The small claims system is not like it is on television,” he said. “I see people trying to represent themselves all the time and they get eaten alive, just chewed up and spit out.”

Esther Patt, Tenant Union coordinator, said the Tenant Union can still provide some services to students who have received a refund, but cannot refer them to Student Legal Services or make any phone calls to landlords for tenants.

“The heartbreakers are students who come in here about a problem that is clearly going to need an attorney, and they got a SORF refund,” she said.

Patt said she recalls a case where three women who had gotten a SORF refund were threatened with a lawsuit by their landlord over expensive damage. Patt said she informed them that they were not eligible for a free attorney and explained the importance of SORF, advising them to not take the refund in the future.

Patt said the women came back the next semester because the landlord did end up suing. However, they had assumed they were in the clear because the threats had stopped, and all three had gone back to get a refund for that semester, too.

“That’s just plain foolish,” she said.

Patt said the Undergraduate Student Association, the Student Senate’s predecessor, came up with SORF as a way to fund Student Legal Service and the Tenant Union, and the decision has paid off.

“In 1978, there were tenant unions at universities all over the country, and most of them do not exist any more, and they don’t exist because of lack of funding,” she said. “So, the people who were involved in student government 30 years ago had some foresight in creating SORF to make sure that they didn’t lose these services.”

Reducing the fee

SORF is up for re-referendum in the Student Senate, and Kurt Thomas, doctoral student and the SORF board’s vice-chairman, said the board is looking to reduce the student fee from $14 to $12 per semester due to surpluses in the budget.

“We feel we have enough money to basically fund what we want to do,” he said.

Yoon, however, felt a better solution would be increasing awareness of the fund.

“I feel like we could give more money to so many different things that could be so beneficial to so many groups on campus,” he said. “It’s just that people are not aware.”

Betz said the board needs to take Student Legal Services’ increasing budget into account. He said they will ask for a $30,000 budgetary increase for each year during the next three years because of increasing costs for the office.

“We are very conservative in what we ask for,” he said. “I would think, long-term, reducing the SORF fee is not a good idea, because the costs in our office, and certainly the Tenant Union – and we take a very substantial portion of that SORF fee – never go down.”