In a unanimous vote, the Student Association Senate approved $6,800 in supplemental funding for Towers magazine this Sunday night.

SA Treasurer Todd Lipscomb said the additional funds will replenish monies which, he said, were erroneously taken out of the magazine’s budget for this year.

Lipscomb said, “The management of Towers discovered that they had paid a bill for last year’s publishing expenses out of this year’s budget. As a result, $6,800 of their $7,793 budget for this year wound up going to pay the publisher of last year’s magazine.

“After the discovery, the editors came to the finance committee and requested supplemental funding so that the amount which was misapplied to last year’s expenses could be restored to its budget for this year.”

Lipsomb also said a university accountant told him “they (the University Accounting Office) should have noticed there was an open account and payment did not go through” on Tower’s account for last year.

Towers Co-Editor Dan Bingley said the oversight was caused by “a combination of problems between last year’s editors, the faculty adviser and the publisher.”

Bingley said, “These problems came about because there was no one here over the summer to provide continuity or who could have handled all our problems,” he said.

Bingley also said the magazine ran into trouble because it dealt with a different publisher than it had been using in the past. Lipscomb said Towers was forced to make the change because of a policy enacted by the Board of Regents.

“Anything which the university has to pay more than $5,000 must be submitted to open bidding, and the lowest bidder gets the contract. Last year another publishing company bid lower than the one Towers had been using in the past, so they got the business,” Lipscomb said.

Bingley said Towers has “totally restructured its constitution” in an effort to eliminate the underlying causes of last year’s problems.

Towers Art Editor Panda Kroll said the new constitution changes existing procedures concerning selection of the magazine’s editorial board.

“Under the old constitution, the faculty adviser responsible for art appointed the art editor. However, under our new constitution, this is no longer the case because the editors will be chosen entirely by students.

“This year, we are planning to publicize and hold a public meeting concerning the selection of next year’s editorial board. This will give all interested students the chance to be involved with Towers,” Kroll said.

Towers Co-Editor Jeanne Forst said the editorial board will be chosen “before the school year gets out, so that we can ensure the necessary continuity of leadership.”

Forst also said she is planning to change the focus of Towers from a primarily literary publication to “a magazine of NIU’s finest creative works, including fiction, nonfiction, art and poetry.”

“Any NIU student, exept an editor, is welcome to submit original works in any of these four categories. The submissions are reviewed in the appropriate committee and then voted upon in a democratic fashion. After the committee makes its recommendations, the editors choose which works to print,” she said.