MEETING START TIME: 5:00 pm
ATTENDANCE: Sit, Kempler, Kilduff, Weinreich, Stuart, Rode, Cicero, Sim, Lanoie, Solomon, Schmuter, St. Jean
DISCUSSION:
• President’s Report:
o Kilduff: We got nominated for a Rainville. That’d be great for the CIO to take the lead on. I know some of us got individually nominated but the CIO probably has all the information probably. I’ve been talking with Mary Jo. It’s hard to get everyone together to do something. Questions?
o Weinreich: Read the book for cost cutting.
o Kilduff: The administration and Management Review Committee’s final report should be read by everyone. It is controversial. It is stuff that people are going to have to deal with because it is a lot of cutting. There is a lot of good stuff in it too and it is an overall good thing. If you want a copy, get it from Bruce or at least read the power point.
o Weinreich: I’ll try to read it tonight and try to have it available to everyone tomorrow.
o Kilduff: None of this is put in place, it is just recommendations. This is the way the Committee feels. Read it and we’ll talk about it soon. We just got the hard copies today.
• SOARC’s Report
o Weinreich: There is a president’s meeting in February not January. I’m gonna start transition materials and budgets. I want groups to have consistency with this so if anyone has ideas about this I’d love to hear them or groups to get mingling and talking, I’d love to hear those too. And I also need announcements for president’s meetings earlier. I am working on the a cappella constitution. I’ll finish that this week and I’ll send it to you all to look at it. Bond and Pink have submitted things for recognition so we’ll be working with that.
o Solomon: I’m meeting tomorrow with Melvin at 11, you can come.
o Weinreich: I’d like to join you. As for Bond and Pink, I’ve been trying to show them opportunities of this action. I might be losing people from my committee, and I need a new vice chair. That’s what I’ve got for now, and I’ll keep you up to date.
• Campus Report
o Rode: I went to the committee for the vandalism and litter on campus. Their problems are how all the signs are being broken on campus. Those signs are going to be replaced and they’ll be mounted on the building. They want to try to find a way to give away the signs. And if anyone wants to be on the committee, they’re looking for opinions. Essentially, I think if we say we want something, they’ll do it. The guy in charge of flyering was there, and he said there is nowhere for students to flyer. We have events but students don’t know about them. So we need to increase programming so we need to work on marketing. It’d be a great service to provide. Digital signs are in the long run, but they want to do something now so
I brought up the idea of message boards on campus. I got a lot of positive feedback. To get 5 of them would be a little over 9,000 dollars. I think it’d be great for students.
o Weinreich: I don’t think it’s our job to provide capital improvements for the university.
o Rode: I’d like to ask for the money first. We have money to do a few capital improvement projects. It’s a good service for student groups. We don’t have to get 5, we can get 4. No one knows where to flyer on campus besides resident halls. It’ll take a little while for people to start using them, but after a while people will get a hang of it.
o Cicero: What about updating the TVs in the Res Halls?
o Rode: That’s something being worked on and people getting used to. And I guess they’re trying to get digital signs above the bus stops but we need to work on the now instead of in the 5 and 10 years from now.
o Sit: The problem is that the digital boards are only controlled by the administration, there isn’t student control. Something more publicly accessible would be better. I prefer it to be less regulated to be more progressive. I know Brown has it.
o Rode: Everything I’ve found is enclosed and I’m looking for something not enclosed.
o Kilduff: You should ask lands and grounds or student life to put some money toward it, preferably all. It is student money, and that’s a great way to do something that will affect most students. Talk to lands and grounds.
o Cicero: Also, the TVs in the Res Halls are really out of tap
o Rode: I can work on that too
• VP Report
o Cicero: We talked about Rodney, the president of exposure wanted to cosponsor their big bang event and we’re cool with that.
o Weinreich: Why don’t we do normal funding?
o Sit: We have a lot of money in co-sponsorship
o Cicero: As you all know, I’m starting up the senior commencement committee. The application is online and the deadline is February 28th. Everyone, please post your office hours and your committee meetings. I have a few people who can’t make their current times so put that on the white board. Other than that, last semester we had the safe-zone, so I’m looking into that.
• Treasurer Report
o Pitu: I’m looking into a universal student senate e-mail. I’m looking into it now.
• Cultural Report
o Solomon: Nothing today
• External
o Lanoie: I made a complaint/compliment box for off campus commuters. I thought it’d be pretty cool. I can create ideas for a brochure for off campus housing. I was thinking Paul and Sydney would want to do something like that. I played around with the off campus housing website, and it’s a little out of date so I want to try to update that. I also will probably try to meet with Katrina. We can put ideas that will be on the brochure on our website too. I’ll ask her during my office hours next week.
• Finance
o Sit: I gave student orgs info on how we’re doing budget. The things that will affect us the most is that affiliates will have a line under student senate.
o Weinreich: We’re going work on that because it’s a crazy amount of work for Pitu.
o Sit: Right now they’ll just apply like a normal group so if we do transition it’ll be easy. Another thing is that contingency should be spent differently so I’m asking groups to budget beforehand.
o Weinreich: We don’t budget groups for certain events for a reason. It is difficult for us to schedule our budget cycle.
o Sit: If they’re budgeting in September asking for money for May, they can do that. Things should be foreseen beforehand. The biggest lost is transitions.
o Kilduff: The transition issue is going to happen and a way to work on it is to have the earlier term work on it so the term that doesn’t have the memory of the previous term won’t mess it up. There are some events that we know are going to happen, but there are always unforeseen issues. If events are reliable, we should budget for that, and we should work on our transitions.
o Sit: On the supplemental budget application system, it is budgeted by tears, so we can avoid doing contingency grants at every single meeting. We’ll figure it out once we go through tear 1 and tear 2. A big problem is that there is a lack of programming in the beginning of the year.
o Kilduff: What if we put it into two spaces where you can apply for contingency.
o Weinreich: What if, for a pilot, what if we do it for the first three weeks for the fall and spring semester. We can set aside money for that instead of doing it for the whole year, it solves the programming problem and doesn’t put too much money away.
o Kilduff: I have a fear of events that won’t happen that we budget for. That’s why I think we should make contingency bigger. I think the best option might be to find out the long term events and budget those.
o Sit: At some point I would like to implement points and standards. What old dominion used to do is groups have ten points for every point they earn, they earn ten percent of their budget. They would go to president’s meetings, hold events, apply for re-rec. They will get their points and their budget. And those who don’t get their points won’t get their full budget.
o Rode: Will there be ways for them to regain points?
o Sit: I have a model if we want to use it, and SOARC can work on it. They would come at the end of the semester and there’d be a cut come fall. The FBP is a true lock up of funds, and I think this is a better way to go about things. This coming Monday, I’ll make myself available for treasurers and presidents to see me and the week after that the budgets are due. I’ll export the data and see which groups have done it. I recommend people apply for supplemental budgeting.
o Kilduff: We need to have a pre-established decision of how we’re going to budget with the entire senate so everyone is on the same page.
o Sit: It seems difficult for us to spend money when we’re spending online. I’d like to increase reimbursement. Also, for inventory, a lot of things are places and we don’t know where we are. I need help tracking where things are.
o Kilduff: We need storage
• DOC
o Kempler: Don’t forget to send me things for the newsletter. I want to get it done.
o Cicero: Maybe send out a template. Also, we want you and Paul to do a brochure for welcome day.
o Kempler: For elections, please share that event.
• Academic
o Zawatsky: Someone from the providence journal is doing an article on the problems of graduating in 4 years.
ADJOURNMENT: 6:00