The Student Senate passed two bills at Tuesday night’s meeting that propose restructuring part of Student Government’s executive branch. The bills need one more round of approval to go into effect.
The bills focus on reorganizing agencies and cabinets within SG. Agencies are more autonomous and focus on specific programs, while cabinets deal with programs for groups of students, said Student Body President-elect Tj Villamil after the meeting.
The Agency Reorganization Act will cut the Gator Health and Safety and Museum Nights agencies. It will also amend the IMAGE Agency to Action SG, which will promote events, activities and interests of SG through media.
Sen. Max Stein said the changes will make it nothing more than an advertising agency. He said that while IMAGE has clearly defined duties, the proposed agency does not.
During the meeting, however, the Senate re-added the responsibility to broadcast meetings of Student Senate, which may contain the Senate committee meetings. The bill then passed.
Villamil said he was planning on filming the Senate meetings anyway.
The Cabinet Reorganization Act will downsize the 23 cabinets to 17. The bill also changed the name of the president’s cabinet to Campus Executive Secretaries, which will deal with policies.
Several senators were concerned that the bill proposed would cut the Graduate and Professional Affairs cabinet.
Sen. Carly Wilson said the bill eliminates the graduate and professional students’ representation from cabinet. The bill also proposed to change the Secretary of Family to the Secretary of Family, Graduate and Satellite Affairs.
Villamil said he planned to have undersecretaries who would deal with those specific areas.
Sen. Elizabeth LaRue, a sponsor of both reorganization acts, said these changes will enhance transparency in the Senate.
“A lot of the changes made will reduce redundant positions,” she said.
The Senate unanimously passed a bill supporting the efforts led by students to protect UF’s engineering departments, especially the computer and information science and engineering department.
Last week, the College of Engineering dean proposed a budget cut of about $4 million.
About 20 senators spoke on behalf of the bill in support of the the department.
“As voices for our constituents, we cannot support those cuts,” said Sen. Joey Michaels.
Contact Samantha Shavell at sshavell@alligator.org.
Jose Soto, co-president of UF’s Graduate Assistants United, speaks about CISE budget cuts at the Student Senate meeting Tuesday night.
