The SGA Senate convened in a special session on Thursday night to introduce two proposed amendments to the organization’s constitution that would replace a position on the Executive Council.
The meeting opened with business regarding the apportionment of seats each college on campus would have in the upcoming Senate elections. The Senate used data from the fall 2024 census to determine that the Capstone College of Nursing would lose a seat in the Senate, decreasing from three to two, while the College of Human Environmental Sciences would gain the lost seat, increasing from three seats to four. This motion was agreed to and passed unanimously.
After that, the meeting pivoted to the larger piece of business: the proposed changes to the executive board. The first of the two proposed amendments was to establish the new “vice president of communications” position on the Executive Council. The goal of the position, according to the proposal, would be to “ensure clear, consistent, and effective communication between the SGA and its stakeholders through various media platforms, while fostering engagement and transparency.”
“In order to streamline the communications process within the SGA, one critical change that needed to be made is in the communications role,” said Samad Gillani, SGA president and author of the amendments.
The second proposed change would seek to dissolve the existing Executive Council role of “executive secretary.” The goal of this action would be to make space for the new vice president of communications role, with the secretary’s various roles being divided and reassigned to the other members of the Executive Council.
“With the addition of an elected office on the council, we will be looking to close one current elected office,” Gillani said. ”We found that we could be more efficient, and with that, we found the executive secretary role could disseminate and the office could close.”
Among the proposed changes is one that would establish that in future SGA elections beyond spring 2025, any person who would like to protest the results of an SGA election would need to present a written petition to the executive vice president instead of the executive secretary within three days after the results are made available.
The proposals were sent to the rules committee before the entire Senate was adjourned. These proposals will be reviewed by the committee and brought back up again for a floor vote at a later meeting in the semester.
If passed by the Senate, both proposals will be presented to the student body to vote upon in the spring semester’s elections, which are Feb. 25.
