The Associated Students of Fort Lewis College met Wednesday night at which time ASFLC president Dustin Fink updated the Senate on student-government elections, discussed changes to the Financial Allocation Board bylaws and created two new FAB at-large-senator positions.
Election Results Held
During his officer report ASFLC president Dustin Fink made a statement about the ASFLC student body president elections.
“The elections committee is unable to announce results at this time,” Fink said. “There have been some procedural processes that have been unable to be completed, and until that is able to happen in a way that is fair and equitable to all the candidates, we will not be able to release any results.”
Check the Indy Online for updates on the ASFLC elections.
Change to Financial Allocation Board Bylaws: Student Sponsored Organizations
ASFLC voted unanimously to approve changes in the bylaws of FAB.
The change created a new classification for organizations that have started as student-led but have grown to a scope beyond what students can handle alone, Fink said.
The key difference is that an SSO has the ability to led by professionals and not students, he said.
An SSO would still receive student funding without having any RSO classification, Fink said.
“Up until, even including this year, the student activity fee has paid the salary and benefits for
both Environmental Center employees and two and a half of the KDUR employees,” Fink said. “That was roughly I think 45 percent of the total student activity fee went to pay those five people.”
In the past ASFLC had been told that paying the salaries of those five people was a non-discretionary line item, Fink said.
There is no legal contract currently that requires ASFLC to pay the salaries of those employees, he said.
Creating an SSO would allow students to have a professional staff to run the organization and gives them more autonomy while still under student-government, he said.
“As our total fee revenue declines, the portion of the pie gets bigger and bigger because they don’t take a hit like everybody else does,” Fink said.
Under this new funding model for SSOs, the EC’s and KDUR’s budget will be dependent on the student activity fee revenue, he said.
SSOs are still student funded but use a slope formula to receive their budgets, he said.
The process to become an SSO is only available to RSO IIIs that have been an RSO III for two consecutive academic years unless it has received a ⅔ majority from the senate, an unanimous vote from the executive board, or a recommendation from the FAB Director, Evan Wick, speaker of the senate, said.
The FAB bylaws were changed one other time this year regarding the firing process of the FAB director, Jacob Wolfe, FAB director, said.
The senate also passed changes to the FAB bylaws regarding RSOs I and IIs.
The new policy does not allow an RSO II or III to be used to gain academic credit, but exempts course 299, 499, Independent Study and The Independent from this rule.
The Independent will link to the bylaws when they are available online.
Resolution to Create New FAB Positions
The ASFLC passed a unanimous vote to raise the number of positions on FAB by two.
These two new positions will be available to the SSOs for the first week of school each semester, Fink said.
If these organizations do not fill the position then it will be opened up as a student-at-large position, he said.
A student-at-large is appointed by the FAB director and has both voting and speaking rights, sen. Rebecca Judy said.