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<p>Sen. Davis Bean, chair of the budget and allocations committee, presents the 2014-2015 budget at the Student Senate meeting Tuesday. The bill passed unanimously. &nbsp;</p>

Sen. Davis Bean, chair of the budget and allocations committee, presents the 2014-2015 budget at the Student Senate meeting Tuesday. The bill passed unanimously.  

RecSports will be busier than ever in the coming year, thanks to an extra $100,000 allocation from UF’s Student Senate.

This money will bring UF students 15 more group exercise classes a week, with five in the morning, five in “prime time” and five classes devoted to cycling.

For gym rats who hate waiting, RecSports will now staff the previously closed Stephen C. O’Connell Center weight room.

The new weight room will also come equipped with finger scanners to ensure that only authorized users can pump iron, said UF Sen. Davis Bean, chair of the budget and allocations committee.

With the additional funding, RecSports can now open basketball courts on the weekends, tentatively from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m., according to a letter from David Bowles, director of RecSports.

Club volleyball will also move to the Florida Gym on weekdays, and a fitness coordinator position will be added, he wrote.

"You always hear the Southwest Rec is crowded, that student rec is crowded," Bean said. “Hopefully this will lessen wait times.”

Additionally, some of the funds will go toward RecSports’ club sports, which allows the organization to remove the current sports club cap, Bean said

This extra funding comes from a rise in the Student Activity and Service Fee that is built into credit hour prices. The 5-percent raise in fees, an additional 84 cents that begins Summer B, was instituted by UF’s Board of Trustees in January, according to Alligator archives.

The bill, SB 2014 10-37, was approved unanimously during Tuesday night’s Senate meeting. No senator spoke against the bill.

The legislation explained how UF’s Student Senate divided the $18,735,300 raised from the activity fee.

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Other major changes include an about $80,000 increase in Student Government staff salaries. Bean attributes this to minimum wage increases, state-mandated 3-percent salary increases, and the creation of a new professional marketing position to be shared by SG and student activities and involvement.

The position has been in the works for years, he said, and will bring attention to SG-funded services like reduced tickets to the cultural plaza and student legal services.

"Now we have a formal position to get the word out about these services that are sometimes underused," Bean said.

The academic budget for groups dipped almost $75,000 to better fit how the organization was spending their budget, he said.

"It's just like what we're doing with Accent," Bean said. "They weren't using all their money, they were hovering right around that $450,000 rate, so we just bumped them down to that."

Accent Speaker's Bureau lost about $46,000, only about half as much as the Reitz Union Equipment Fee, which went from $96,400 to zero.

These cuts, Bean said, went toward staving off more drastic measures, like the earlier committee consideration to cut gym hours. Instead, SG asked that the Reitz reuse and repair older equipment.

"I couldn't imagine going back to the students and telling them that we closed their gym two hours early every day," he said. "So we went through warranties and maintenance plans first to save the actual services students need."

Sen. Anthony Sorrentino spoke in favor of the bill, especially the increases for student salaries on campus.

“The more that we can employ students, the better,” he said. “That's something I like to see in the midst of this construction."

[A version of this story ran on pages 1 - 4 on 5/29/2014 under the headline "RecSports gets infusion of cash, will add classes "]

Sen. Davis Bean, chair of the budget and allocations committee, presents the 2014-2015 budget at the Student Senate meeting Tuesday. The bill passed unanimously.  

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