It is important to note, when selecting a candidate for Student Association treasurer, the importance and magnitude of the office being contested.

Each year, the SA allocates nearly three-quarters of a million dollars to various campus organizations. The treasurer is ultimately in charge of that distribution.

Because of this, the treasurer must be able to deal with the budgeting process with meticulous efficiency.

Roger Beith seems prepared to do so. He has served on the finance committee—the backbone of the budgeting process—for a year-and-a-half and has been a senator for one year.

Because Beith has no ties to any funded organizations, there is little chance he would show favoritism to any one organization while budgeting.

Beith also proposes developing a policy which would require finance committee members to check funded organizations through university General Accounting System reports. This would ensure organizations spent money as they proposed in their budgets.

Beith believes all organizations have the capacity to raise some money on their own and would promote such activity in an effort to cut spending.

Finally, Beith would hold a seminar for finance committee members to teach them about the budgeting process before the fact instead of sending them to meetings without an understanding of their responsibilities.

These are all solid ideas and Beith should be given the opportunity to test them.

Diana Turowski, Beith’s opponent, has served on the finance committee for one year and shares many of Beith’s ideas. However, she seems to lack the intensity Beith showed in expressing those ideas.

In addition, Turowski has ties with WKDI and the Greek system which, despite her claims otherwise, could create the possibility of bias—or at least distracting accusations of bias—during budgeting.