A USGD meeting was sidetracked by controversy on Friday when a legislative technicality sparked a discussion of accountability within the organization.
A consent agenda is used when multiple resolutions need to be passed and discussion is unnecessary, packaging agenda items into one and passing all in a singular vote. The resolutions in the meeting’s consent agenda were pocket vetoed previously because of a failure to sign the physical copies of the legislation.
In the wake of handling this initial setback, the conversation moved to address that the consent agenda was not posted for the public within 24 hours of the senate meeting, as required by USGD’s bylaws. The resolutions missed the mark by one hour.
Senate President Lauren Arenas opened the issue up to the senate and the audience — three student-organization representatives in attendance to make budget requests later in the meeting — to ask if they felt “comfortable” voting on the legislation regardless of the multiple issues at hand.
The general consensus of the audience was that the one-hour margin wouldn’t greatly impact the validity over the legislation, although the USGD vote was split on the issue.
Vice President of Policy Ryan Boyd cited ethical concerns in allowing minor concessions when it comes to the bylaws of USGD.
“It seems like a bad idea to be giving in little pockets of exemption when there hasn’t been a really pressing need,” Boyd said.
Boyd reminded the senate of an instance where USGD acted outside the bylaws, and showed that such exemptions could lead to student harm.
Two years ago, USGD voted to support a new athletics fee without everyone knowing that the fee had been amended, even being changed “the morning the vote was taken,” Boyd said.
Boyd characterized this blind-sighting action as an example of what could happen again if USGD allowed exceptions to their bylaws.
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College of Public Service & Community Solutions Senator Michael Spadafore said that time interval was not significant enough to warrant the tabling of the resolutions.
“Since it was an hour and it wasn’t anything too huge, a discrepancy in time of the bills being put out… I don’t think it is too big an issue,” Spadafore said. “I think that amount of time wasn’t enough to discredit this.”
The senate chose to vote on the consent agenda, passing the three resolutions by a margin of 7-1.
The discussion came up once again during an agenda point discussing nonfeasance. The point was originally intended to be a discussion about concerns with USGD senator Enrique Zamora, but Zamora resigned from his position as a senator prior to the meeting.
This left the agenda point open for a discussion of ethics and responsibility within USGD.
“This is something we’ve started to see more and more,” Boyd said. “Where we’ve voted on three bills that are technically in violation of the bylaws, we have a senate resolution that we voted on the 23rd which is nowhere to be seen, we have no legislation on an operations budget, which you have, as a senate, complete control over.”
He told the senate that all of these problems are easy to solve, but that USGD has yet to take the necessary actions to do so.
“I would so love to have my name off those three pieces of legislation we illegally passed today,” Boyd said.
Senator Austin Miller agreed that Boyd was raising valid concerns, but called them mistakes and said that they were not meant to be “malicious.” He mentioned the senators’ role as students to account for their errors in protocol.
“It’s really hard for me to know every single technicality of the way policy works,” Miller said. “I think we all want to be versed in this sort of knowledge so we can operate in the right way.”
Senator Braeden Schaefer was the only senator who voted against the consent legislation. He told the room that the problem wasn’t an issue of the senate not understanding the technicalities, but the symbolism in the senate understanding that they were violating the bylaws and deciding to vote anyway.
“It’s not the silly mistakes that are the problem,” Schaefer said. “It’s that we don’t go and correct these things. Like today with the legislation, that was a silly mistake we had the opportunity to fix. We knew they were in violation of the bylaws but we decided to just go ahead and pass that.”
USGD President Corina Tapscott added that all senators have undergone training, covering such legislative technicalities and bylaws in preparation for issues like these.
“I don’t think our senate right now is expecting action beyond what happened today. I think that they are expecting, though, for our senate to not have this happen again in the future,” Tapscott said.
Contact the reporter at csmannin@asu.edu.
