The Student Association (SA) announced that Bad Rabbits, Sage the Gemini and White Panda will co-headline Spring Fling. Yeah, we’re not too familiar with them either.

Various factors impact which artists the SA Programming Board (SAPB) can book for Spring Fling. Not every artist is available on May 2 — maybe because they’re already booked, maybe because they simply aren’t in the Northeast. The only factor over which we really have control is how much we can pay them.

Binghamton isn’t the only school trying to book acts for a spring festival: Other schools and venues bid for acts touring in the area, and whoever offers the most money is going to get the performers’ services. No band is coming to Binghamton for charity.

The SAPB is already hobbled by a deficit of around $30,000 that it is in the process of overcoming. Over the past couple of years, it has relaxed spending on its events to try to balance the budget. So while progress is being made — and it’s getting there — there is still substantial ground to cover.

This reasonableness aside, every penny we save to be fiscally responsible is a penny we can’t offer to a well-known band that we might book for Spring Fling.

There is, however, a way for the SAPB to increase its funding to overcome the deficit whilst bringing in the big names that we all want to see: We pay for it.

Currently, the undergraduate activity fee sits at $95.50 per semester. The Programming Board gets $11 of that. If BU students approve of the upcoming referendum, the activity fee will be raised by $3.50 per semester. The budget will then be rearranged so that the SAPB receives an additional $1.50. With the 13,412 undergraduates that attend the University right now, that would amount to $20,118. That would greatly expedite the recovery from the deficit, even if no other sources of funding are made available.

This is not an exorbitant sum of money. We know college is already expensive, and we understand that calling for higher fees is an unpopular opinion to hold, but consider this: Were the fee raised just slightly more than $3.50 — say, to $6.80 (the price of a chicken burrito at Chipotle) — and we gave the extra $3.30 to the SAPB along with the $1.50 it would already receive, we would have an additional $64,377.60 to attract all the big names that our Spring Fling deserves.

We don’t know about you, but we would be willing to trade a burrito for another Matt & Kim caliber concert.