After talking about how to encourage students to vote, Ohio University Student Senate passed seven resolutions focused on budgets, appointments and an amendment to the rules Wednesday night.
Nick Felt, governmental affairs commissioner, led a discussion about the Civic Engagement Initiative, which focuses on how the university can get more students to vote in elections.
“All that work (to increase voter registration) was great and stuff, but it kind of made the governmental affairs kind of lose its touch with being an actual liaison to city council and the Athens city commissioners as well,” Felt said.
Felt proposed many ideas in his presentation, one being to add a ballot location to help decrease the size of voter lines.
Senate then moved on to voting for the proposed budgets.
The four budget resolutions focused on Pride Week, Blaktransmagik and the Environmental Justice Summit. The primary sponsor for all of the budgets was Jacob Haskins, university life commissioner, though he let Jordan Kelley, LGBTQA vice-commissioner, speak about each resolution.
“The total cost for Pride Week is about $10,000. We raised $8,000 of it from outside sources,” Kelley said. “Also Blaktransmagik is two performers, two trans (people) come and talk about the importance of storytelling.”
Two appointments passed, one appointing Zach Woods as the chair of the Standing Committee on Senators Emeriti and the other named Connor Atrell, Scripps College of Communication’s senator, to the internal budget committee.
Following the appointment of Woods, Student Senate Vice President Courteney Muhl offered positions to senators in the room for the Standing Committee on Senators Emeriti, and five are now a part of the committee.
“There are seven or eight open positions, and we need some of these to be filled by external people,” Muhl said. “With the five senators that just volunteered, there are two positions left that will be filled by these people.”
The last resolution for the night was an amendment to the Rules and Procedures regarding a proxy for the graduate college senator. The amendment was to allow the graduate college senator to appoint a graduate student as his proxy.
“The judicial panel is in favor of this resolution, as it would make sense to have a proxy that is still in some way a representative of the constituent,” Student Senate Treasurer Steve Lichtenfels said.
Senators were unsure if the resolution would lead to other senators requesting to be able to appoint a proxy from their colleges. Chief of Staff Landen Lama spoke up about a concern that it would set precedent for other senators to start choosing external people as their proxies.
Muhl said the senate will not hold meetings March 29 due to an advocacy event and April 5 due to the Leadership Gala. Muhl expects all senators to attend those events.
— Maggie Campbell contributed to this report.
