The Graduate Student Council, or GSC, approved the 2005-2006 ASSU Operating and Fee System Budget during last night’s meeting at the Graduate Community Center. The new budget features a decrease in graduate student fees for next year, said GSC Deputy Chair Tom Lee, an electrical engineering graduate student.

The GSC unanimously approved both the ASSU Senate budget and a separate GSC budget.

“The decrease in fees is largely because Club Sports did not receive [graduate student] funding this year,” said GSC Funding Committee Chair Adam Beberg, a first-year engineering graduate student.

“We also encouraged organizations with large reserves to spend them down,” he added. “Even if Club Sports had gotten their money, fees still would have gone down.”

Lee said he was sorry that the Club Sports Program no longer receives special-fees funding from the graduate student community.

“It’s unfortunate that the special fee for club sports didn’t pass,” he said. “We’ve had discussions with them and were working with them to make sure that they stay afloat this year.”

Club sports received 67.64 percent of the graduate student vote. But because less than 15 percent of the total graduate population voted for Club Sports during the election, the group failed to receive graduate funding. They did still receive undergraduate funding.

“Not enough grad students voted,” Lee said. “That’s something we need to work on.”

Lee said the budgeting process was not at all contentious.

“A lot of people worked really hard to communicate with others about their needs for the year,” he said. “We hashed out a lot of issues beforehand. That’s why we had a relatively smooth budget process especially when that came to the final vote.”

The GSC proposed nominating a liaison to the ASSU Undergraduate Senate to further improve relations with the ASSU and the undergraduate population.

“One of the things we’d like to do is improve communications between the different branches of the ASSU,” Lee said. The liaison will go to the Undergraduate Senate meetings and represent the GSC’s point of view when appropriate.

“If something is going on, we should be there giving the grad student perspective,” he said. “There are only a few things that only affect the undergrad population. We will be making sure we identify items of mutual interest and make sure they progress.”

The council voted by consensus to fund and sponsor an In-N-Out Study Break, scheduled for Thursday, June 2. It also passed funding requests from the Stanford Graduate School of Business Canadian Club and the Stanford Malaysia Forum.