University of Wisconsin’s student government covered everything from copy shops to spanish certificates at their Student Council meeting Wednesday.
Internal Budget
Associated Students of Madison, finalized their internal budget Wednesday, increasing funding for the Rape Crisis Center and adding a fund for Food Pantry Student Staff.
ASM approved the internal budget with a roll call vote of 18 to two with one abstention. Funds of $19,115.20 were given to the Food Pantry Student Staff with a vote of 16 to three with four abstentions, and Rape Crisis Center funds increased from $40,000 to $100,000 with a vote of 20 to four.
Bob’s Copy Shop Legislation
During open forum, the council deliberated over legislation concerning Bob’s Copy Shop policy of not accepting credit cards.
The “Bob’s Copy Shop Legislation” was presented earlier this year to ASM and it charged the chair of ASM with sending an email to all local coffee shops and asking whether they accept credit cards, University Affairs Committee Chair John Paetsch said.
The chair of ASM was then charged with sending that information to professors and encouraging them to use copy shops that accept credit cards, Paetsch said. The new legislation would require Bob’s, and other copy shops, to accept students’ credit cards he said.
Getting community input
The University Affairs committee and the Legislative Affairs committee each shared updates on their current standings.
Some members of ASM have been seeing legislators at the capitol, and they usually only talk to people from their own district who have personal stories, Legislative Affairs committee member Kate Youngers said.
Youngers said, ASM needs the help of students across campus to lobby legislators, whether it’s giving them a phone call, sending an email or even going to their offices to speak with them.
The University Affairs committee survey, emailed to many students, was an effort to gauge whether there is student interest in departments of international language offering certificates. According to survey results, many students reported wanting a Spanish certificate.
There are more than a thousand University of Wisconsin students in the Spanish program, and 70 percent of the Spanish students who responded to the survey reported interest in a Spanish certificate.
“[The committee] could not have asked for a better set of data than we got. … It gave us all the responses we needed to get this campaign moving,” Paetsch said.
Biennial Budget
Legislative Affairs Committee Chair Tom Gierok outlined the timeline that the biennial budget will follow, which lasts from September 2014, when the budget is prepared by the Wisconsin Department of Administration, until July 2015, when the Wisconsin state Senate and Assembly will make amendments to and vote on the budget.
“The budget will impact students because it will determine the tuition levels for in-state students and how much financial aid will be given out to in-state students through grants in the budget,” Gierok said.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly showed a picture of Bob’s Copy Shop
