The University Park Allocations Committee (UPAC) exhausted its funds for travel requests for student organizations on Tuesday and is currently low on money to allocate to various student organizations.

Galen Chelko, UPAC staff assistant, said this year, the committee has funded more than 1,400 students to attend conferences, competitions and other learning experiences through Penn State. She said UPAC has received more than 386,000 travel requests and allocated more than $281,000.

UPAC is a student-run organization that receives requests for funding from different organizations on campus and determines which groups will receive funding based on these requests.

UPAC receives a percentage of the student activities fee and general funds from Penn State and then allocates this money based on a first-come, first-served basis. However, the general funds that UPAC received for this academic year were reduced from the previous year, Chelko said.

She said the funding UPAC receives each year is always a projected amount, and it is never guaranteed. The percentage of money from the student activities fee depends on enrollment each year, and the amount of money UPAC receives from Penn State's general funds depend on the priority of student activites, she added.

Keyur Shah, UPAC overall chair, said the university is cutting budgets all across the board to save money.

"We were given $2.3 million for the entire year, but it actually isn't a lot of money when you consider the variety of things that the money goes to and the fact that it is being stretched all over campus," Shah said. "The money goes to travel, programs, media, equipment, club organizations, UPAC itself, Late Night [Penn State], recreational sports, etc..."

The amount of requests UPAC received from the student organizations this year was significantly larger than the budget that the committee had to work with.

"You are bound to hit a point where there are more requests than there are funds because there are over 700 student organizations on campus," Shah said. "But we have made a lot of successful allocations so far this year and will continue to allocate money as long as there is still money to allocate."

Lindsay Gaspar, president of the Penn State Singing Lions, said she was told they would probably be the last group to receive money for travel because the budget for travel requests had been completely depleted.

Due to UPAC's decreasing budget, student organizations are forced to seek funding from other sources and find other ways to help raise the money for their events.

Mark Taticchi (junior-political science), who was rejected funds from UPAC for a residence hall student leadership conference this February, said they are currently pursuing funds from other campus resources in order to attend the conference.

"Most people have been fairly satisfied with the UPAC funding, but it does seem really early in the semester for all the money to already be depleted," Taticchi said.

Zac Chappell, treasurer of The Asylum, Penn States club for underground music, said his group needs to start focusing on developing their own source of funding, so they are not dependent on UPAC alone.

"I think maybe UPAC needs to restructure how they are allocating the money, but I really think a big part of the problem is with the student organizations themselves," Chappell said. "We just go to UPAC looking for a handout because we don't want to make the effort of raising the money on our own, but they can't support every organization on campus who does this."

Although UPAC is no longer allocating for travel requests, there is still a small amount of money left in the budget to allocate to on-campus programs, Chelko said.

All request forms for the summer and the 2006-07 academic year will be available on Monday, Feb. 6.

Judy Albin, senior associate director of unions and student activities, said many groups assume UPAC receives the same amount of money each year, but this is not the case.

"In a perfect world we would have enough money to fund all requests but the reality is that student organizations are becoming more savvy in their requests," Albin said. "It is just impossible to do more than we are."