Members of student government postponed the appeals hearing for the Multicultural Student Coalition Monday night and passed a piece of legislation that would grant more oversight to the budgetary approval process.
Last Thursday, the Student Services Finance Committee tabled the MCSC appeals hearing until Monday, as some members of the committee did not feel comfortable proceeding at the time because members needed further education as to the appropriate steps in the process.
During last night’s meeting, the SSFC decided to postpone the appeals hearing until next Monday after some members expressed they still did not feel comfortable with the appeals process.
Rep. Justin Bloesch, who motioned to move the meeting to next Monday, said he is meeting with a professor teaching a class called “Data and Decisions” today and encouraged members of the body to join him so they could gain a better understanding of how to evaluate the information presented in the appeal.
Later in the meeting, SSFC Chair Sarah Neibart said she had emailed committee members the appeals process since the last meeting, encouraging members to approach her with questions. She said she was disappointed the body could not proceed with the hearing as scheduled.
Members of MCSC expressed concerns about being considered a test case and a lack of preparedness provided by SSFC members during open forum.
During the meeting, the committee also unanimously passed the Process Standardization Committee legislation. Neibart said this would fall under the jurisdiction of the Rules Committee as an additional charge and that it will provide a third party group to evaluate new forms.
She said originally the legislation intended for it to be a body that would generally check the power of SSFC and other allocating bodies, but the committee decided that was less constructive.
“We felt as though we needed a committee which in a viewpoint-neutral way would review new forms or applications and then to say to a group, ‘yes, by a third party it was reviewed and is valid,'” Neibart said in an interview with The Badger Herald.
The committee also addressed further discussion of contract status for groups, especially in light of its possible effect on the Wisconsin Student Public Interest Research Group’s budget.
WISPIRG Chair Matt Kozlowski spoke during open forum and said the organization needs contract status to function. He said his group is ready to help in the creation of an SSFC procedure regarding contract status.
The committee centered discussion around the time frame in which the committee needed to create a process for contract status cases. For WISPIRG’s purposes, a process would need to be put in place by the end of the semester, Kozlowski said, based off of an email from the University of Wisconsin’s administration.
Rep. Laura Checovich said she felt the administration was contradicting itself because the committee does not need to create a process for a group’s contract status to be granted by the chancellor. She said she also felt the time frame which this would impose would be impossible, as a process would need to be finished by the end of the semester.
With this in mind, the body discussed solutions and decided to issue a resolution to the administration stating its support for contract status and General Student Services Fund groups.
