[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmJMhNxQJY]

By: Christina Vittas

The semester may be winding down but the Student Government Association is in full force.

Bouncing back from the organization’s elongated election, SGA was in for another big week. The budget for the 2018-2019 academic year was passed after presenting each individual budget for all of the SGA charted organizations.

The current Vice President for Finance Ryan Hicks and the finance committee presented a budget totaling $600,000, which matches the 2017-2018 budget. The lack of funding provided by the university has caused major cuts to the 140 plus student organizations that rely on this budget.

Although the budget was passed, the university has not confirmed $600,000 as the total amount of funding for 2018-2019. Hicks shared his plans of stressing the importance of more funding to student lead organizations to administrators in hopes of receiving his requested amount of $789,506.

Uniforms, formals, conferences, and off-campus travel (with the exception of the sailing club, QU Snow and other organizations that rely on traveling off campus to fulfill their mission statements) have been cut across the board. The American Institute of Graphic Arts organization and Students of Philosophical Hypothesis in Academia club both received a budget of $0.00 due to lack of representation during the budget proposal.

The meeting continued with another presentation given by Junior Class Vice President Joe Iasso. Iasso shared the plans for creating a new judicial branch to the organization’s structure.

Although not finalized, the proposed plan is to add non-representative justices as well as a chief justice that would be a new member of the executive board. This branch would act as an ethics board and be responsible for handling grievances, bylaws and constitutional disputes. However, these plans are still up for discussion and are said to be finalized in the coming weeks.

What did pass, however, were title changes for the majority of SGA as all class representatives will now be known as senators. This change was mostly implemented in hopes of further growth and alterations to SGA’s structure. Additionally, the “vice president of public relations” title has officially changed to “vice president of marketing and public relations” in an effort to be more accurate in the position’s responsibilities.