Here’s something of a nice end to an otherwise thoroughly frustrating story.

Back in mid-April, we found out through the Argus (and through the mass verbalization of concerned parties, probably) that the SBC prematurely ran out of funds for the semester—by late March/early April, it seems. This meant that student publications (and whatever student groups had operations late in the semester) were completely denied funding through almost no fault of their own. As the Argus article reported,

Members of publications cited the fact that the SBC requires groups to specify exact amounts when applying for funding, while the exact amounts of money that publications will need will remain uncertain until the end of the semester.

Flash forward to today, and the SBC seems to have managed to come up with the cash late in the fourth quarter to give student publications the funding they need. They did this through  a “reassumption” process—which basically involves pressing student groups who have received funding earlier in the semester to cough up leftover cash. (The SBC was able to reclaim about $4,000, which to me is somewhat unsurprising, as it’s pretty well-known that excessive funding requests—and other forms of corruption—is fairly prevalent in the SBC-student group interaction. See relevant awkward bits in the WSA Prez Debate.)

As one would expect, the SBC came out of this entire episode pinned beneath a dense hail of criticism. (But then again, they’re always under fire). In response to this, Cameron Couch ’13, the SBC chair, posted an open letter on the WSA website to publicly acknowledge the criticism, clarify the narrative of the problem, and suggest in which areas improvement can be cultivated. Choice morsels and key points after the jump.