Starting with the Spring 2016 Student Government election cycle, qualifying candidates for executive positions from all political parties will be required to participate in a lone SG-sponsored debate.
Candidates who don’t attend the debate, which will be overseen by the supervisor of elections, will be disqualified. A transcript of the debate — as well either a video or audio recording — will also need to be made available to the public within 48 hours of the debate’s end, a problem that surfaced with the debate sponsored by SG’s Freshman Leadership Council during last Spring’s elections.
The debate updates are one of about a dozen changes that will be implemented inside SG following the approval of the seven sets of Student Body Statute reforms at Tuesday’s Student Senate meeting.
Led by Chairman Ty Robare (Swamp, Business Administration), the 13-person Comprehensive Statute Reform ad-hoc committee spent about 15 hours over nine weeks this Summer preparing reforms to the statutes.
Revisions to the 800 codes, a 39-page set of codes revolving around finances and the final chapter in the Student Body Statutes, are still being made.
In addition to the debate changes, other approved reforms in the statutes include requiring the executive committee to meet at least once every two weeks and changing the SG General Assembly to a State of the Campus Address, among others.
Majority Party Leader Charlie Brown Jr. (Swamp, Agriculture) supported the changes made by the committee and said the code revisions aid to protect the students and provide for transparency.
“I believe it delivers on that job,” Brown said. “To insinuate or think anything other than that, I think is misguided.”
While the majority of the Senate expressed its support for the reforms, a group of five Senators — Minority Party Leader Michael Christ (Access, Graduate), Sen. Preston Jones (Access, Hume), Sen. Hammaad Saber (Access, Engineering), Sen. Reina Saco (Access, Law) and Sen. Daniella Saetta (Access, Graduate) — pushed for amendments throughout the night, looking to either add clarity or eliminate what they viewed as unneeded changes.
Overall, 27 amendments were requested, with 22 coming from those five Senators.
Thirteen minor changes were approved throughout the night, with eight being friendly amendments agreed upon prior to the meeting. Three of those eight involved replacing the abbreviation “EST” — Eastern Standard Time — with the phrase “local time.”
All amendments that involved any sort of policy change not initially created by the committee — from removing the voting rights of the Budget & Appropriations chairperson in the executive committee to changing five counts of the word “guilty” to “at fault” — were all rejected by at least 75 percent of the Senators.
The main argument for the denial of the policy-changing amendments was a lack of time to discuss changes that could negate what the committee worked throughout the summer to accomplish.
But Saber said debate is an essential part of Senate, regardless of the amount of time given to prepare, a message that echoed from last week’s meeting.
“If it’s something that needs to be discussed because it wasn’t discussed at the committee, then it needs to be addressed,” Saber said. “And that can be done on the Senate floor.”
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 7/30/15]
Ty Robare, comprehensive statute reform ad hoc committee chairman, gives his committee report at Tuesday's Student Senate meeting prior to the second reading of the reforms.
