A couple of pretty important and interesting things happened this past Student Senate meeting, and I feel it’d be pretty helpful to mention them in tandem with whatever The Alligator reporter writes about the meeting as well.
Senate meetings typically have a normal format, and I’ll run through it chronologically since… well, it makes sense to.
We start off with the call to order, the Pledge of Allegiance and then roll call. Then we go over amendments to the minutes and the agenda. Traditionally, the bulk of what actually is “done” in meetings happens here when the majority party will move to unanimously approve executive and legislative appointments and minutes.
Aside from the usual appointments to Senate committees and such, we also approved the amendments to the budget for this upcoming year as well as executive appointments to the local fee committee. Now I know I got some flak in the past when I wrote about the local fee committee, saying Student Government had killed mental health funding back when the local fee committee denied proposals by entities such as the Counseling & Wellness Center and the Disability Resource Center for health fee increases, so here’s a bit of atonement and explanation.
The Student Body president will appoint students, typically SG officials, to the committee to serve as student members. There’s professional staff on the committee, and I would consider it a university committee. So its “students” just happen to all be SG officials, and the same rule applies this year with the director of internal affairs, the director of external affairs, the Student Body vice president and the former chief-of-staff (so I suppose a former official in this case) being given the seats. These four students will be voting on whether to raise some of the fees we pay as students in order to better fund the entities they help support.
As I noted the last time I wrote about the committee, there’s not a lot of literature out. There’s still a bit of snooping around on my part for me to do as I peer into the intricacies of our university.
My folks and I wanted to question them, but three were out of town and one had an exam (“we are students, before student leaders,” as we say), so what can you do? We’ll try again next week.
Following amendments to the agenda is public debate. It’s been the space for some of the protests this past year and also generally serves as a good place for information and outreach. One senator talked about the importance of cutting meat from one’s diet and the importance of having good vegetarian and vegan options so rabid meat-eaters like myself will willingly take a break from being a carnivore at times. Another senator talked about efforts in sustainability and student concerns with litter.
I personally went up to talk about an electric scooter rental company, Bird, that was interested in coming to UF, explaining the concept and going over potential pros and concerns. I’ll probably write more on that later since it’s a very interesting pitch to make to the students and administration.
For now, I want to focus on a very interesting development that is likely going to be highlighted in The Alligator article as well. After public debate, there is typically just a bunch of officer reports. Much information is spilt there, and something cool we found out yesterday during our budget chair’s report was that our budget actually went up by 2 percent.
To quickly sum it up, every student pays $19.06 per credit hour, which is how we get our $20-plus million dollar budget. Because there was an increase in the credit hours that students took and are taking, we got more money without having to raise student fees. Thus, our budget chair and committee were able to increase funding in a lot of areas of our budget, hence the amendments we had to approve, so there will hopefully be more cool things and programs for students in the coming year.
Questions, comments or concerns? Email me at zchou@ufl.edu.
Zachariah Chou is a UF political science sophomore and Murphree Area Senator. His column focuses on Student Government.
