I ask myself the question posed in the headline all the time. I suppose it’d probably be good for me to have it out there somewhere on the internet for the poor souls who miss out on our Student Government Preview tabling.
I always knew I wanted to be involved in SG, so as soon as I knew I would be attending UF, I went snooping around The Alligator’s website for an answer to this question.
So, here it is. The most important thing our Senate does for UF is setting the budget. I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing many current and former senators’ resumes, and people love to mention that our Senate controls a $20 million budget.
This isn’t exactly accurate, though. It’s just the nine senators who are given a spot in the budget committee. If you happen to find yourself in the right place at the right time and favored by the right people, you get to be part of the committee that manages the money, which is split between the “big four” entities: RecSports, the Reitz Union, SG and Student Activities and Involvement.
Aside from the budget committee, there are nine senators who receive spots on the allocations committee, which doles out $50,000 every year to organizations that are not on the budget cycle.
The rest of the senators don’t get to touch a single dollar. That doesn’t mean, however, we just sit around and do nothing. Senators are usually the ones behind a lot of the outreach that SG does, like the tabling during the school year (independent of executive branch events), including the tabling during Preview.
Any senator can also write a bill or resolution. Though bills are typically written by the allocations committee to give organizations not on the budget cycle money, they encompass any legislative change to our laws, known as codes, or our constitution.
For example, when my party (Inspire Party) wanted to mandate live-streaming of Senate meetings, we wrote a type of bill called a “code revision” to make it happen. Resolutions are just statements of our Senate, representing the Student Body. Depending on the strategy behind them, they can either do nothing, or they can bring attention to a deserving issue and hopefully lead to some tangible change.
Senators are also expected to work on the behalf of students. You could actually be represented by as many as 23 senators, based on where you live and your classification. For example, I represent the 1,000 or so students in the Murphree Area and am also represented by six College of Liberal Arts and Sciences senators, too.
There has been a lot of bipartisan progress in reaching out to our constituents. One senator established a Listserv this past semester for all the people that live in his district, a particular zip code, which has allowed for all the senators of that district to communicate with their constituents directly for the first time. As a housing-affiliated senator, I’ve used Listservs in the past to reach out to all the residents in my area as well, and that’s led to some initiatives for me to work on during my term. A couple of my columns will be dedicated to bringing to light these success stories, giving credit where credit is due.
I hope this trip into SG informs you greatly. There’s plenty more to come, which is great, because a column a week is quite a lot of words in a year.
Zachariah Chou is a UF political science sophomore. His column focuses on Student Government. He’s a senator representing Murphree Area.
