Central Hall Music Society faces doubt over its future after becoming saddled with large amounts of debt.
The long term debt problem reportedly arose out of a number of errors, including the late handing in of production receipts, lack of accurate budgeting and insufficient cooperation between CHMS and other performance societies.
Further more, the society left many expenditures until the last minute, resulting in an inflation of costs.
Joseph Williams, producer for CHMS’ critically acclaimed ‘Into the Woods’, described the debt as “manageable” and emphasised that the debt is not due to any mistakes made by the current committee.
To deal with the debt, an emergency meeting of the CHMS committee has been called for Thursday 8th March, in which they will also elect a new committee. They will be focusing on plans for fund raising over the summer, as well as outlining future plans for CHMS.
On this date, they hope to mould the relationship between themselves and the production team, and to ensure a closer working relationship in the future. Together, they hope to help Central Hall keep checks on their expenditure and prevent future overspending.
YUSU Student Activities Officer, James Croydon, revealed to Vision, “With all performance societies, we like to see a well planned budget a good time in advance so we can plan and make sure that the performances are financially viable. Our performance societies are a credit to the union and performances that attract members of the public are great for fostering a good community between local residents and the student population.”
Joseph Williams, however, went on to question the lack of YUSU support for performance societies, especially when compared with that given to sporting societies.
“I think the support the University shows as a collective to its sports societies is fantastic. York prides itself with a great number of performance societies, and I’d like to see as much effort from our Student Union put into promoting events such as the Central Hall Musical as is apparent with events such as Varsity.”
Despite the financial troubles the society has faced, they do not expect the productions to be affected, due to the structure of YUSU’s accounts, where spending money is unlocked each year for the society’s productions.