Attendance: Kilduff, Weinreich, St. Jean, Sit, Solomon, Sim, Zawatsky, Stuart,

Campus:

Rode: Thank you for the safety and lighting walk, I sent out an e-mail for everyone and I’m working on the survey for arming campus police. Also, vice president Dugan says he’ll do whatever we need to spread the survey.

SOARC:

Weinreich: De-recced a bunch of groups from the bill. Some of them are coming back and the point of that is to talk to each of them to find out what went wrong and see how we can fix it. Usually it’s because they didn’t know they needed two signatures. Other than that, I have some bills on the floor for groups. There’s nothing controversial. There is one that is close with the Musician’s Guild. Keep an eye out for that, Brian. I’ve come up with a solution to the a cappella problem that I’ve been having. Right now I have at least 3 separate groups seeking recognition but none of them can differentiate from each other. We would need to recognize one of them and fuse them all together. I talked to a few people involved in one of the groups and explained their process and I proposed an idea of a central affiliate of senate. I’m trying to avoid calling it a council but this is the only way I can fix this. I don’t want to have a ton of affiliates. So I’m thinking about recognizing URI a cappella and working it out that they can’t deny new a cappella groups. It’s a rough idea and we’ve been planning it out. I’m meeting with all of the groups on the 4th of November.

Zawatsky: Is there going to be a central coordination issue?

Weinreich: Each group has a process that they do to get new members. They do auditions, then call backs, and then audition again.

Kilduff: I think it’s better to take the counsel route. These groups are similar to fraternities and sororities and it’s a matter of selecting people that will work with their group and its competitive and through that it’ll be good to look at other schools.

Weinreich: One of the groups is strictly women, can that be done?

Sit: Yes

Weinreich: I don’t know much about the arts.

Kilduff: Just let me know about the meetings so I can sit in on them.

Weinreich: I don’t want it to be called a council because I don’t want a lot of other groups to start councils.

Sit: We do have a very large university in Providence that does this and we can ask how they do it.

Weinreich: I would sit down with these groups and write their contracts out.

Kilduff: The model you most likely have to use is the IFC PANHEL model.

Weinreich: I’ll try to create the infrastructure of this so Brian I’d appreciate if you can help me with this. I also need BOND, PINK, WOW and other affiliates to get in touch with me because it’s almost November and re-rec is done, so I want to get this done ASAP because the liability issue still exists.

Kilduff: We don’t make it a practice to go find groups, and if they don’t want to come to us then you shouldn’t waste your time and effort finding them.

Sit: They were afraid that there was no benefit to becoming affiliates

Weinreich: Please, if any of you see them, get them in contact with me. The liability issue that was presented really needs to be taken care of. That’s where I’m at right now and I don’t have anything else major. Now we just need to discuss how we talk about affiliates. I can come each week to exec with my affiliate requests. Some of these affiliates are going to have a very hard time on the floor. Some of these will be controversial so I want to be ready.

Sit: A huge deal is whether they’re funded or not.

Kilduff: It’s set case by case so we’ll figure it out as such.

Academic

Zawatsky: I was at the provost council meeting and he requested the senate’s help as far as expanding the word on the j-term because it’s important as the first time to be moderately successful to boost courses for future terms. He also wants help in researching barriers to graduation. Also the UCGE needs another letter of support from us I think so I’ll have to draft a letter. As I mentioned last week, the framework I had constructed for the student/faculty messaging system got shut down in committee. No one has any ideas for a new framework. If no one comes up with anything, we’ll just drop it. I talked to the Provost and his suggestion was to institutionalize sending messages to department chairs. It would just be a matter of us getting the word out. That could go with those academic complaint posters I put up.

Sit: When you go through the chair it’s almost the equivalent of a complaint though because you’re telling their supervisor.

Zawatsky: In the undergrad academic advising committee that we helped construct a few years ago. This is a result of that, and Maynard and I will be attending meetings for that. That’s all.

External

Lanoie: We talked about our carnival prizes that I handed to Kim last night. A few people picked up their prizes. At the same time, Kim said that it’s good because people know where the office is. I also told my committee to read the comment cards from the carnival. The commuter housing fair is on Wednesday and it will be from 11 AM to 2 PM in atrium 1 I believe. They have free food and the realtors will be there and they’re friendly. We also talked about a rate my housing website. We’d try to make it factual, not opinionated. It all depends and we talked about it more today and I think it’d be a great November project. I’ll talk to the lawyer and see what he says. Also, on November 4th, I have Linda Anderson hired by the department on housing and they’re looking on for a focus group of commuters. They’re forecasting the demands for housing at URI. I’ll make an announcement at the general meeting. If anyone wants to go, that would be nice. That’s pretty much all I have.

Weinreich: So, I have family who live in West Kingston and the town of South Kingstown that has authority of the area are putting together something similar to the orange sticker policy and we may want to get involved in the discussion about that. This directly targets students.

Kilduff: It is a violation and it’s profiling.

Lanoie: One of the girls on Senate says the bus on Sundays runs every 2 hours instead of every 45 minutes and it gets so crowded that they have to turn people away so I want to see if they’re aware of that. I’m going to try to contact them to see what’s going on.

Cultural:

Solomon: Caramel apples on Saturday went well. I’ll keep track of what was used for the transition binder. We’re going to work on ace of cakes from here on in. Once I get going I’ll keep you all updated.

Treasurer:

Sim: Stipends are out tomorrow. I’ll be working on a few things with Jenna and Ansley.

Finance:

Sit: We are having our first loan with dressage because they collect dues in the spring, not in the fall. The loan and the grant are about the same amount. I haven’t talked to my committee yet, but I’m letting you know that that’s going on. It may seem like a lot, but equestrian has similar ratios that they use so dressage isn’t much different. They’ve had their start-up capital earlier and they have guaranteed

donations and their dues are collected for $2000. Like any other club sport, they fundraise. They have their income coming but it’s at a different time. Musician’s Guild is asking for capital improvements for a drum kit. I’ve asked them about a few other things also. They did fundraising and they’re trying to donate to a girl’s family but it’s hard for us to write a check to an individual so we’re going to try to write this to the auditor. I’ve advised they donate to a foundation and then have the foundation set up the funds. We’re also working on the Finance handbook and figure out how we should go forward with recognizing affiliates and one big thing is figuring out the budgeting. I know we are moving toward the contingency grant funding as opposed to the end of the year review. We’re also thinking about moving money from student tax and making a line to pay accounting. In the past we’ve paid it out of interest. Now that Laurie is full time, that money is not a much, and it doesn’t make sense for us to not budget that. It makes it difficult though, because it gets difficult to add lines. College Democrats wants to move a lot of money into a separate account, but it is complicated because it is a fundraising line so it has to be in the 900 but no other group has a separate fundraising line. We can make it 901, but this is case by case and rarely used. It can’t stay in the general 900 because it can then be used by things that it isn’t meant for. It is difficult because of our auditing process. We can’t move money into things like that according to the handbook. In the future that will be changed. If it were a brand new system it would be nice to have a reserved fundraising account, but that’s not how that works. This is still a tax exempt organization. We’re talking about roughly $4500 dollars

DOC

Kempler: I’m doing the newsletter. Send me your reports. I’m going to try to work on that tomorrow. Chris had a really good idea to write an article for the cigar about the importance of filling out the survey that is going to be on arming campus police.

President

Kilduff: Brian and I have been working on only senate groups being in the union and we’re waiting on Bruce coming back and there might be a bylaws change. The Cigar wants to do a write up on senate. I have an interview with them tomorrow. We’ll be working out that tomorrow and that’ll be a good way to get our name. My commitment is now free, so does Tuesdays at 7 works? That’s when our new meeting time. I’ll keep you all in touch as Bruce gets back to me.

Time: 7:53