ASUCD Vice President Bradley Bottoms presided over the Senate meeting on Thursday, Oct. 10. The meeting began at 6:20 p.m.
The highlight of the meeting was the passing of a bill that would give the Elections Committee the option to decline the distribution of sample ballots through The California Aggie. This bill was proposed and passed due to a lack of funding for the Elections Committee this year. The bill gives the option to the Elections Committee to not post sample ballots in The Aggie if they do not have the funds to do so. If the Elections Committee chooses not to post the sample ballot during election time, it will take a significant amount of funding from The California Aggie. This bill was also questioned due to the breaking of a long-running tradition that ASUCD has with running sample ballots in the Aggie.
“It’s upsetting that ASUCD had to write a bill to take away funding from The Aggie,” said ASUCD Senator Maxwell Kappes, who introduced the bill. “It had to be written due to the financial situation with the Elections Committee, because they were purposefully under-funded.”
New and returning members Kelly Kong, Alexander Abu-Hakima, Ian Lee and Marissa Ayala were confirmed to the EPPC Committee. Nichelle Esquitin, Warren Kim, Jeremy Kirshner, Nate Bentham and Mary Sedarous were confirmed to the Internal Affairs Commission Board. Allan Bach, Kimberly Yu, Katherine Green, Rahul Sachdev, Sana Sareshwala, Angela Santos and Joyce Sun were confirmed to the Academic Affairs Commission. Phi Nguyen, Priya Seth, Lawrence Feygin, Daniel Riesgo, Wesley Wang and Alisha Makmuri were confirmed to the E-fund Commission Board.
A bill was passed to formalize the process of ASUCD renaming units in order to have only one name assigned to every unit run by ASUCD. Another bill was passed to tighten the use of Robert’s Rules of Order during Senate meetings and to make points of inquiry consistent with those rules. Many senators were relieved that a bill to clarify the use and restrictions of deferments during parliamentary procedures was passed. They believed it would save a lot of time during meetings, due to the fact that senators will no longer be able to use deferments simply for having more time to talk. The last bill that was passed clarified the role of Commission-authored bills and was questioned by some senators. The bill passed 8-4.
Senator Miles Thomas described what his presentation on ASUCD finance will entail. This presentation, along with others, were rescheduled to happen at next week’s meeting.
MELISSA DITTRICH can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.
