MaryPIRG President David Bransfield and intern James Jalandoni said their group relies on interns to lobby for student issues.

MaryPIRG members won’t go down without a fight – they took the first steps yesterday toward saving the group’s internship program, which received massive cuts from the SGA last week.

David Bransfield – the president of MaryPIRG, an on-campus public interest lobbying group – filed an appeal with the Student Government Association’s governance board on Tuesday to overturn a recent referendum that made it unconstitutional for the SGA to continue funding MaryPIRG’s two salaried positions. These full-time, non-student employees run the group’s internship program – the two salaries amount to about $43,000, which is taken out of the mandatory student activities fee every undergraduate pays.

Because the SGA does not typically fund salaries, students vote every two years on the body’s elections ballot whether to continue to fund these positions. Last Wednesday, the body announced that 37 percent of voters opposed funding these salaries, while 32 percent voted in favor. MaryPIRG members then returned the $12,297 the SGA funded them earlier that week, leaving them with a little more than $1,000 – enough for the group to survive, but not for the salaries.

“Without funding for staff salaries, MaryPIRG would not be able to run this internship program, which is clearly a valuable resource for the over 50 course credit interns we’ve had this year and hundreds of volunteers who work on the campaigns we run,” MaryPIRG Campus Organizer Dan Herb wrote in an email.

Bransfield said the news came as a surprise, as members of MaryPIRG spent three days petitioning students across the campus to vote to continue funding the salaries, and collected a total of 2,117 signatures.

“We know that students on this campus think that we should be doing what we’re doing,” he said. “We got almost 2,200 signatures, and the numbers don’t lie.”

However, the group was the subject of controversy during last year’s SGA funding process, when MaryPIRG was allocated more appeals money than any other student group. Because some legislators were concerned students did not fully understand what MaryPIRG’s funding went toward, the body reworded the referendum on this year’s ballot to include the group’s salary breakdown.

As far as student groups go, student activities fees do not only support MaryPIRG’s salaries; the fees also fund the salaries of student defenders in the Undergraduate Student Legal Aid Office. According to the behavioral and social sciences college guidelines – out of which MaryPIRG runs its internship program – students may not run programs that offer class credit, which is why the group hires non-student employees.

Despite the cut, Bransfield said he is determined to preserve the group’s campus organizer position next year – the employee who educates and trains the interns on grassroots activism and organization.

Junior government and politics major James Jalandoni, a MaryPIRG intern and campaign coordinator, agreed many students would lose a valuable opportunity if the internship were lost.

“This internship provided me with a lot of skills I previously did not have. I learned to organize and make change about issues I care about,” he said. “And the skills taught to me are available to anyone in the university.”

Bransfield noted MaryPIRG advocates for important student issues, including voter registration and college affordability, and the group depends on interns to lobby for these issues in Annapolis.

“We will keep doing our work,” Bransfield said. “The work we do is not work that can be replicated without us. … Losing our internship availability would be a tragedy for our campus.”

Some students said they did not have a problem with their fees going toward salaries as long as it benefited students in the long run.

“It sounds like a good organization,” freshman journalism major Kate McNee said. “It’s good for students to practice and lobby for things so we can keep that going to be active in government.”

Others said it was fair to give students the opportunity to decide whether their fees would go toward these non-student positions.

“If students disagree with it, they have every right to vote against it,” sophomore government and politics major Kevin McIntyre said. “If they consent, then that’s okay. If they don’t, then MaryPIRG’s out of luck.”

villanueva@umdbk.com