The decision to dissolve CFRC’s business manager position has been repealed in a closed ballot vote at the AMS Special Corporate General Meeting last night.
Ayanda Mngoma was fired on Oct. 2 after the AMS Board of Directors imposed a new budget model for the station, which attempted to balance the station’s projected $19,000 deficit for the year.
The Special Corporate General Meeting is held every fall to discuss and vote on changes to AMS bylaw. A similar meeting is held in the winter semester.
Around 22 members voted against proposed changes to the AMS bylaw that would get rid of the position, while 13 members voted in favour.
A new strategic budget plan for CFRC was presented by Rico Garcia, CFRC volunteer, alongside Lisa Aalders, CFRC’s spoken word programming manager and Neven Lochhead, CFRC’s music programming manager.
As a result of the vote, the AMS will reopen applications to the business manager position at CFRC today.
Part of this includes creating a new continuancy committee that will deal with the station’s ongoing deficit after it becomes financially autonomous in 2014.
It will be comprised of representatives from CFRC stakeholders, with a member from the AMS, SGPS, the University and the community.
The committee will seek to develop a campaign in the winter to raise CFRC’s AMS mandatory student fee from $5.03 to $7.05 and its SGPS fee from $3.75 to $7.50 through referendum, in order to give the station greater financial stability.
In the event that the student fees fail to increase, CFRC will make cuts to staff salaries and restructure their management system.
“I think [the stability plan] showed people that we were serious about our future and the fact that we do have a plan, it’s just that we need this extra member of staff to be able to implement it,” Aalders said.
She added that the business manager plays an important role in garnering funding for the station.
The sponsorship and outreach position, a volunteer honoraria-based position designed to replace the business manager position, was much more focused just on advertising which only bring in about five per cent of CFRC’s total budget revenue, she noted.
“Right now we’ve been really stretched thin in terms of our ability work from a day to day basis so planning for the future seemed next to impossible but now we’re confident moving forward,” she said.
Tristan Lee, AMS vice president of operations, said the strategic plan put forward by CFRC should have come earlier.
“I do think that this document should have been put forward way in advance of this meeting, about four months ago, before the decision to remove the business manager was made,” Lee, ArtSci ’12 said.
Instead of waiting for the SCGM in November, the AMS needed to take action immediately in early October, said Rob Gamble, Chair of the AMS Board of Directors.
“The problem was that we received a budget in August but our budgeting process was time sensitive, that is why we took action,” he said.
“We still think [removing the Business Manager Position] was a good idea, but the members of Assembly were a little more divided on that.”
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