Dylan Lustig, the vice chair of the Student Engagement Committee, and Eugene Law, Student Association parliamentarian, presented a bill that stimulated heavy debate before it was passed at Monday’s Student Association meeting, held at 7:30 p.m. in Maxwell Auditorium.

The bill — Home College Committees — mandated that each home college establish a committee with the purpose of ensuring communication with constituents. The bill was passed on the basis that a lack of communication between representatives and constituents hurts SA.

Lustig supported the bill, saying it is the primary job of assembly members to represent their constituents and that SA members could do more to fulfill that role.

Representative Alexandra Curtis agreed that having committees based in home colleges would be a good idea because there is no other way to work with the representatives from the school when they are spread throughout committees within SA.

This point was countered with arguments pertaining to specifications of the creation of the individual committees within each separate college and the actual necessity to make more mandated committees.

SA President Neal Casey said the bill presented had a lot of holes. He said creating more requirements scare away student leaders and that he could not ‘support the bill in its current form.’

‘It’s a great idea. The reason I wouldn’t support it was because I don’t think it was thought through well enough,’ Casey said after the meeting. ‘In my experience with SA, when we don’t think things through well enough, they fail.’

During the meeting, Lustig countered Casey, saying he was confused about why Casey was no longer backing the bill after Casey originally told Lustig otherwise. ‘This is a huge surprise,’ Lustig said.

Lustig reinforced that this bill was not part of his campaign for SA president and that he is only trying to make the organization better. When debate finally came to a close, the bill passed by a small margin.

‘I think this is going to help our organization, and I think that now we can have a mandatory approach to doing our jobs,’ Lustig said.

The assembly entertained four rounds of assembly member elections. Of the 15 candidates, one was elected to represent the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, one to represent the College of Arts and Sciences, one to represent the School of Information Studies, two to represent the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, three to represent the College of Visual and Performing Arts and three to represent the School of Architecture.

The School of Architecture went from having no representation to full representation and VPA also went from being underrepresented to having a stronger voice. The Arts and Sciences, iSchool and Falk elections were all contested, which led to debate within the assembly.

By the end of the meeting, Casey announced that the assembly had seven seats left to fill and that SA is operating at 90 percent capacity.

Said Casey: ‘We reached a major milestone today by breaking 90 percent, so we are right where we need to be, we can see the summit.’

Other business discussed:

• Jenn McKay, chair of the Student Engagement Committee, gave a report in which she said that the town hall meetings in the residence halls have been effective and more are planned in the near future. She also said voting on the winner of the Recognized Student Organization program will take place this Friday.

• Several Finance Board bills presented by Comptroller Jeff Rickert were voted on by the assembly. Seven bills were passed in which only The Outcrowd magazine and Alpha Tau Omega were granted funds. Rickert emphasized that just because SA has large amounts of money to allot to organizations, that does not mean standards will be lowered as to what type of events get funding.

rebarill@syr.edu

Published on October 10, 2011 at 12:00 pm