The Student Association Senate met on Monday for a meeting that focused on routine procedural matters, with approval of event co-sponsorships and updated financial rules consuming most of the session.
The Senate unanimously approved $6,246 to help 12 students attend this year’s Clinton Global Initiative University, a three day global entrepreneurship conference being held at Arizona State University in March. GW hosted the event in 2012, and is sending a total of 20 students this year.
The Senate also approved a $15,000 co-sponsorship for the College Democrats to bring a speaker for the annual Only at GW Debate Series. The event is jointly run by the College Democrats, the College Republicans, and the Program Board. The event will feature two speakers, one provided by the College Democrats and one by the College Republicans. The Senate had approved a co-sponsorship to support the College Republicans’ speaker at an earlier session.
Omeed Firouzi, President of the College Democrats, (as well as a U-At-Large S.A. Senator), said that he couldn’t reveal the name of the speaker at the moment, but that it was a “big name speaker… [who] appear[s] on television a lot.”
The sole piece of legislation considered was to update and amend the rules regarding student organization allocations and S.A. finances. Senator Ryan Counihan (SoB-U), chair of the Finance Committee, explained why each of the over a dozen changes to the 15 page bylaws was necessary. Counihan said the committee had been working on clarifying and updating the bylaws for months, which was necessary because “a lot of things just got messed up” in the previous year.
Despite the work of the Finance Committee, a few errors and ambiguities slipped through, and senators successfully proposed amendments to fix various typos and grammatical mistakes, such as correcting “or” to “and” and “ant” to “any”. Eventually, the legislation passed unanimously.
Senator Chris Stillwell (ESIA-U), chair of the special committee tasked with creating a report about the possibility of student representation on the school Board of Trustees, said that he had no updates at this time but “we will have updates at the next meeting.”
Outgoing S.A. President Julia Susuni and Executive Vice President Kostas Skordalos congratulated the President-elect Nick Gumas and EVP-elect Avra Bossov on their respective wins in last Thursday’s election.