The Associated Students of Madison Legislative Affairs Committee announced several new positions and continued outlining plans for a rally that would improve awareness of decreasing financial aid Monday night.
UW freshman Kayla Lubenow was announced as the new recruitment coordinator for LAC. The position was created to encourage more students to attend meetings.
“I’m just hoping to bring more people in here to make students more active with what is going with this committee,” Lubenow said. “I feel like a lot of the issues that we’re working on here really do affect students, like the downtown plan and Mifflin.”
LAC also appointed three new UW freshmen interns for the semester: Mudit Kackar, Madison Oie and Rachael Kuehn. The interns are volunteers who earn three credits and will each work on a different LAC project.
“I am looking for experience and I would like to get something done like most interns do,” Kackar said.
For the first time, LAC split into two different subcommittees, one focused on issues at the city level and the other at the state level. Chair Adam Johnson said he hopes the subcommittees will create discussion because it will be easier for members to talk in front of a smaller group.
“Both of the vice-chairs said they got a lot of good ideas, some new ideas and some feedback on our current ideas,” Johnson said. “It’s the first week and I’m seeing some good results and hopefully it will just continue to get better every week.”
The state subcommittee decided to focus on bringing awareness to the problem of shrinking financial aid funds available to students. LAC is beginning to plan a rally at the Capitol for the end of the semester to try to increase knowledge of the issue.
“It’s scary how much the deficit is between how much financial need there is and how much we’re actually being given,” State Vice-Chair Kyle Woolwich said, “If the march ends up how we want it to be, it will definitely be covered by a lot of media.”
The city subcommittee discussed a student housing fair, the Mifflin party, downtown renovation and lighting issues on Langdon Street, according to City Vice-Chair Sam Polstien.
Also covered at the meeting were ways in which LAC can increase transparency and let students know what they are working on. UW freshman and former intern for LAC Lauren Ehlers said there were issues with open records last semester and LAC is working on improving them this semester.
“A blog seems like most logical at this point, but I will also [be] looking into other options,” Ehlers said.
