Students are set to lose control of part of their surplus fund, after the Allegheny Student Government ended the year without approving any major capital projects. At the April 16 General Assembly, ASG President Nicole Recio Bremer, ’25, said that she hoped to have a project presented at ASG’s final meeting on Tuesday, April 23. However, that presentation did not happen, leaving the project — an outdoor classroom space next to Pelletier Library — in limbo.
ASG leadership were told by the college administration that they had to spend at least $200,000 of this year’s roughly $530,000 Surplus Fund on major capital projects for student use — or else the funding would be absorbed back into the college’s general fund, according to Dean for Student Life Trae Yeckley.
ASG’s General Fund is funded through the Student Activities Fee, a payment of $290 per year included in students’ final tuition bill. The General Fund supports standard club requests like event supplies and consistent expenses. At the end of the year, any unspent money in the General Fund is rolled over into the Surplus Fund, to be used for one-time club investments like equipment and uniforms.
Pre-pandemic, the Surplus Fund typically hovered around $125,000. However, when Allegheny implemented social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19, clubs stopped spending out of the General Fund. The unused funds ballooned the surplus to more than $500,000 in the 2021-22 academic year, before dropping down to $365,000 last year and then back up to around $530,000 this year, The Campus previously reported.
“The idea is, we don’t want the money to sit in an account that just sits there for future students to use when, you know, the students who have been currently paying into it should get some sort of benefit from that,” Yeckley said in an interview Wednesday.

February
At the Feb. 6 GA, student leadership heard a pair of proposals from Chief Information Officer Katrina Yeung to install outdoor Wi-Fi connectivity across campus and at the Robertson Athletic Complex. The proposals, which would have cost around $50,000 each, were not voted on by ASG.
After Yeung’s presentation, outgoing Vice President Sam Ault, ’26, told the Senate that they would be hearing “a whole bunch of ideas” for where the surplus could be invested, and that they did not want ASG to feel rushed to make a decision on how to spend the money.
“We want this to be a process where you all feel really engaged and good about what we’re going to be investing in,” Ault told the Senate at the time. “You guys have time to go and ask your peers, ask your classmates, ask people in your residence halls, ‘What matters to you, which would you prefer?’”
The project intended to be presented this week was an outdoor classroom setting in the green space next to Pelletier Library, which Yeckley said was based on student input for what to do with the Caflisch lot. It began development in the first week of February, according to Ault’s report at the Feb. 13 GA.
“After having heard some feedback about major investment, I’m currently working with Physical Plant to begin thinking about a plan for a pavilions/potential outdoor classroom space as a possibility for major investment, to share ideas with you guys a little bit more concretely about something like that,” Ault said on Feb. 13. “I don’t have a timetable for when that’ll be ready to show you guys yet, but it’s in the works as of last week.”
Yet apart from Yeung’s presentation, no further projects have been presented.
Yeckley told The Campus on Wednesday that ASG had been looking at how to spend the surplus since last summer, with the conversation heating up at the start of this semester.
“I think just between working with students, working with outside agencies, the focus on the concert kind of took some distraction away from this outdoor project — and then all of a sudden, it was the last GA,” Yeckley said.
Neither Ault nor Recio Bremer responded to a request for comment for this story.

Uncertain future
Moving forward, the planned Pelletier green space is still largely undefined. Yeckley said ASG still does not know how much the outdoor space would cost, and did not present on Tuesday because they had not heard back from their architect.
“We haven’t seen the final design, or even a couple of examples of certain final designs,” Yeckley said. “We’ve just started talking now about what it might look like.”
Yeckley is not sure what will happen next, given that ASG has been asked to fund the projects by the end of the fiscal year in June. They do not yet know if the project will be funded over the summer, if it will be voted on by next year’s ASG or when exactly the surplus will be out of ASG’s hands.
“What I can say for sure is that Sam and Nicole have been very much a part of this conversation up until this point, Ella and Ray are going to continue to be a part of this conversation, as well as other members of their Cabinet, so that we will ensure that representatives of the student population is the driving force behind this (project),” Yeckley said.