September 24th Senate Meeting Preview

STUDENT CENTER – MPR. Student Government’s agenda for the fourth Senate meeting of the semester features three new pieces of legislation, and a vetoed resolution which sought to establish a committee to discuss the future of Wildcat Media. Also in tomorrow’s agenda, Election Committee will give its first report since Club Advisory Board President Maximus Azzarello was elected chair of the committee last Thursday.

The election has been ongoing since September 3rd. On Monday, Election Committee announced that they had removed the position of Vice President from the ballot.

The vetoed resolution, titled Wildcat Media Ad Hoc Committee, was sponsored by President Noa Lolona Haro and passed unanimously by the Senate on September 10th. The resolution would have created a committee to review Wildcat Media’s governing documents and propose changes to the organization’s structure and positions. However, President Lolona Haro later vetoed the resolution, which he explained in his report the following Senate meeting.

“We took a completely different approach for Wildcat Media, and after consulting the situation at length with SGU Advisor, we have decided to disband Wildcat Media entirely,” President Lolona Haro stated in his executive report. President Lolona Haro went on to explain that this choice was unanimously agreed upon by the the Student Association’s (the legal entity behind Student Government) Board of Directors.

After the president vetoes a resolution, it is returned to the Senate floor, where the Senate can override the president’s veto by a 2/3rds majority. (There are currently three sitting Senators, all of whom voted in favor of the resolution when it first passed.) As a recognized student organization under Student Government, any changes to Wildcat Media’s governing documents or its disbanding would need to be approved by the Senate. Last week, meeting time expired when the resolution was being discussed, and so it is still up for discussion.

"I personally find it disingenuous to both the established goals regarding WCM and unfaithful to the student body,” said Aiden Pascal, a sophomore who served as Wildcat Media’s Live Event Coordinator last year. “Given [that] he passed this and then vetoed it, it feels as if he did this to simply appease the conversation at hand, but did not truly care for it in the first place.” Aiden added that he views President Lolona Haro’s decision as “..blatantly taking away the ability for the student body to have choices in how their money is distributed, and only giving them options in the boxes that [President Lolona Haro] allows."

One of the new bills on the table, sponsored by Club Advisory Board President Azzarello, makes minor grammatical fixes to the Club Advisory Board’s governing documents. The other new bill creates contracts within Student Government’s Policies and Procedures for two new positions: Creative Design Coordinator and Social Media Coordinator. These positions were removed from Student Government in 2024, but references to them still exist in Student Government’s Constitution.

The final new piece of legislation is a resolution seeking to transfer funds from the Student Government Special Projects funding line into the new Social Media Coordinator’s stipend. Students familiar with Student Government Financial Policy said that this appears to go directly against the rules surrounding stipends, pointing to section §13.5.0 in Financial Policy which states: “Stipends are fixed immediately following the approval of an operating year’s budget and cannot be amended.” The outlined exceptions to this rule do not address stipend changes for the creation of new officer positions.

The Senate meeting will take place tomorrow, September 24th, at 12:30pm in the Student Center Multi-Purpose Room. The agenda for the meeting along with the minutes from last Thursday’s meeting can be found on Campus Groups, under Student Government at Utica’s Documents.