Author: Lena Smith
The student body of Occidental College voted 521 yes and 22 no to pass several revisions that the Associated Students of Occidental College (ASOC) Senate proposed making to its constitution on Nov. 2. The revisions took effect as soon as they passed.
The major changes in the proposal gave the Senate the ability to call for General Assemblies, made the Occidental Bike Share Program a student service instead of a club and adjusted how KOXY is funded.
“That’s a pretty clear mandate for Bike Share to become a student service, considering that’s pretty much all we talked about during the election,” ASOC Vice-President of Internal Affairs and Politics Major John O’Neill (senior) said via email.
The vote was extended due to technical failure of the myOxy Portal on Nov. 24, which students used to cast their ballots. For constitutional changes to pass, at least one quarter of the student body, 530 students, must vote and two-thirds of the votes must be in favor.
A constitutional review committee comprised of ASOC Senators created a proposal of changes after examining ASOC’s constitution and comparing it to constitutions at similar colleges. The Senate as a whole decided to put some of the changes up for a campus-wide vote and rejected others, such as staggering ASOC Senator elections.
General Assemblies – meetings open to the entire Occidental community to discuss and vote on prevalent on campus issues – have been called in past years in order to discuss meal plan changes and the sexual assault policy. They are designed to provide ASOC with valuable input from students, faculty and staff.
“We want to get the decision makers in the room,” O’Neill said.
This year there have been no General Assemblies because no one occupies the Senate positions of co-chairs of General Assembly who have the authority to call them. No students ran for the position.
To make up for not having General Assemblies, ASOC has called open forums. These are less effective, according to O’Neill, because the participants cannot vote on issues, but they can learn about and discuss them. Holding open forums instead of General Assemblies means that while students had the opportunity to voice their opinions at the open forum on dances on Nov. 21, they were not able to make decisions by voting.
The change to the Bike Share program provides a steady and increased amount of funding. As a student service, they now have a set budget every year instead of requesting money for individual projects. Before, it was unclear whether Bike Share was a club or an organization or a service. Funding came from the Urban and Environmental Policy (UEP) department’s Renewable Energy and Sustainability Fund and from proposals made to ASOC, according to UEP major Charles Deffarges (junior), who originally brought the idea to ASOC.
By becoming a student service, Bike Share’s sources of funding remain the same, some coming from the ASOC budget and the rest being allocated from the Renewable Energy and Sustainability Fund. Sustainability Fund’s contribution increased to 25 percent of its budget. There are currently no specific plans, but ASOC will work with other student organizations and clubs to determine the best places to make cuts to account for Bike Share’s increase in funding, according to O’Neill.
Deffarges hopes that becoming a student service will let Bike Share expand, create specific roles for the students involved and be more accessible. He envisions being open more hours, incorporating a daily rental service in addition to the currently weekly rentals and operating from a more central location on campus.
“I would say maybe 50 percent of the students that come in just need a bike to go to CVS or hit up the bank on Colorado [Boulevard]. There’s demand there, it’s just that we need to be able to support that,” Deffarges said.
The change to KOXY is designed to ensure that the set amount of funding the organization receives supports activities that engage in free speech, mainly broadcasting. In the past, KOXY was treated as a journalistic organization like The Occidental Weekly, receiving all of its funding in one yearly allotment. ASOC determined that some, but not all, of KOXY’s activities engage in free speech, and the new structure of its funding reflects the distinction.
KOXY is funded by the student activities fee that every Occidental student pays each year. It received 7 percent of the income from the fee in previous years and will now receive 3 percent as of the vote. Activities that are not related to free speech such as concerts are funded supplementally, so KOXY will request the money by submitting a proposal to ASOC.
“While this may seem threatening at first because we are losing guaranteed money, the senators I have talked to have assured me that does not necessarily mean that we will have less money next year and may even result in us having more money (or probably most likely- the same),” KOXY Station Manager James Gallagher (senior) said in an email to KOXY staff. “In my personal opinion, this seems like a change that was bound to happen, it didn’t necessarily make complete sense why we get a fixed percentage of student fees to throw concerts, whereas programming board or other groups are providing the same/similar services to the student body had to go through the budget proposal process.”
The constitutional changes also included a number of minor revisions. One is streamlining the constitution by eliminating repetitive wording. For example, clauses like the honor code were stated twice in the Constitution. The restated clauses have been eliminated to prevent confusion in the case that they are altered in the future. This revision ensures that clauses will never accidentally appear multiple times with conflicting phrasing. The other one reorganizes the Constitution so that information on a single topic, for example all information on the Senate, can be found in one place.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
