The BHC picked up on the story over the weekend.
http://www.tricities.com/tristate/tri/se...-0007.html
BY Daniel Gilbert
Reporter
JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. – The cost to bring Carrie Underwood to East Tennessee State University worked out to an eye-popping $41,077 per song, or $7,120 a minute for the time she played.
But the $534,000 price tag raised nary an administrator’s eyebrow until April – weeks after the country starlet and klieg lights had come and gone – when officials realized they had overdrawn their concert fund account by $209,000.
University officials have frozen the account, funded by student activities fees, and are borrowing money from internal cash reserves to cover outstanding fees until new activities revenues accrue. They credited the miscalculation to "human error" and said they have taken steps to fix the problem, but offered few specifics.
A spokesman declined to comment on whether disciplinary action had been taken.
"Someone misread a [computer] screen, and thought there was more money available than there really was," said David Collins, vice president of finance and administration. "We’ve gone over again how to read the screen. It’s a new accounting system, and we’re all still learning."
The upshot of the accounting error is, after settling the debt, about $161,000 will be available to bring in performers for student concerts in the coming academic year. That amount is down from the $726,601 spent in 2007-08 on Underwood and band, the All-American Rejects, and roughly half of the budget for concerts in the two previous academic years, according to university records.
"We anticipate having concerts, but not on the scale of Carrie Underwood," said Joe Sherlin, dean of students in the Office of Student Affairs.
University administrators said their method of accounting failed to dock expenditures from the concert fund, creating an illusion of a higher balance.
"The problem was that the accounting was not up to snuff," said Steven Bader, chief student affairs officer, who is ultimately responsible for signing off on student activities expenditures.
There also appears to have been a communications breakdown between Bader’s office and the university’s financial administrators, who generally review contracts.
"We probably should have caught it," said Collins, whose staff normally verifies account balances before an expenditure is approved. "We relied too much on Student Affairs. We didn’t watch the balances. Quite frankly, it shouldn’t have slipped through, but it did."
The Carrie Underwood concert cost nearly as much as four concerts from the two previous academic years, including Ludacris, the Goo Goo Dolls, Dierks Bentley and David Spade.
Some 8,000 people attended the concert at the Memorial Center, which was free to students and faculty members.
ETSU students pay $20 in activities fees for both the fall and spring semester – part of a push to bring big-name entertainers to campus that began with a student-approved fee hike in 2005. Three-quarters of the revenues are shunted into a superfund for a major event twice a year, and the rest goes into a general account for bankrolling projects by student organizations.
Student government officers – in concert with a faculty supervisor – exercise the financial purse strings of the activities funds. There is no limit, beyond what is in the account, to what can be spent on a single event, Sherlin said.
The normal process for bringing in a performer begins with a student poll in which students indicate their artist preferences. ETSU officials could not immediately provide numbers on how many students voted this year, but the student newspaper reported that 1,900 students cast ballots in the poll that included Underwood – the top vote-getter. A university spokeswoman said 13,389 students were enrolled last fall.
Student government representatives work with school administrators and a booking agency to settle on a performer within their price range. Representatives with Underwood’s booking agency, the Nashville-based Creative Artist Agency, said the singer’s fees vary widely, depending on the venue, and declined to quote a base fee for a university concert.
The high-dollar event generated some controversy on campus.
"For $400,000 – the amount paid for Carrie Underwood’s recent concert – ETSU could have easily had two or three [or more] less-famous musical acts, or even some kind of progressive music or performance series," wrote student Mira Gerard in the East Tennessean on April 3. "Something like that would represent the alternative to what we all can get by turning on our radios and watching TV."
But the depleted activities’ fund did not seem to trouble T.J. Mitchell, who was elected president of student government just a week after the concert, and whose administration will now be saddled with that debt.
"Students certainly got their money’s worth," said the rising senior, a chemistry major, of Underwood’s concert. "You always try to look at the positive side of these things. There’s nothing you can do about it now."
Staff Writer Brent Carney contributed to this report.
dgilbert@bristolnews.com