The Marquette Student Government Senate voted 24-0 on legislation to bring Bublr Bikes to campus while a former amendment about student organization appeals was brought up for another debate and vote.
Bublr Bikes
Marquette Student Government passed a unanimous vote to install a Bublr Bike station on campus at a Senate meeting Oct. 12.
Five students, including Austin Anderson, a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences and president of the Triathlon Team, attended the meeting to show their support of the legislation.
The next step is to decide a location for the station, which will be the first station west of downtown. Right now, the closest station to campus is at the Central Library.
The new station will have 17 to 19 docks with blue and gold Bublr Bikes to represent Marquette.
MUSG also plans to work on safety initiatives for the bikes.
“Safety is definitely a number one priority,” said Aliya Manjee, a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences and MUSG Vice President.
Manjee and MUSG President Zack Wallace presented a PowerPoint before the vote that listed ideas such as providing helmets and hosting rides focused on student safety.
Wallace and Manjee quoted Bublr’s Executive Director Kevin Hartman in their presentation to emphasize Bublr as an initiative for campus engagement: “The value of it is that it isn’t a bike rental station, the real value is that it connects to things.”
The station should be completely installed by March of next year.
Former Amendment
Senator Cameron Vrana, a sophomore in the College of Business Administration, reintroduced an amendment about the Senate’s ability to appeal budget committee decisions regarding student organization funding allocations over $2,500.
This amendment originally passed in fall 2014 after SOF went through an evaluation process with the Lean Six Sigma Program. The evaluation revealed an “unintentional” loophole between the Senate’s vote on student organizations’ appeals and the budget committee’s ability to override a denial.
Although the Senate must vote on SOF allocations over $2,500, the student organizations can appeal in a case where any amount is denied. This appeal goes to the budget committee and is sent back to the Senate for one more vote.
This process changed last spring semester when legislation passed to revoke the Senate’s final vote.
The budget committee now has “the ability to appeal any decision (from the Senate), regardless of the amount,” Wallace said. “We simply ran out of time to be able to go through with this extra step in the process of having the Senate approve appeals.”
The length of the application process did not allow enough time for the Senate to pass a vote if a student organization appealed its funding for the fall.
“That put student organizations at a real risk because they didn’t know whether they got that money for an entire summer,” Vrana said.
This issue specifically affected organizations that received allocations over $2,500 that relied on Senate’s vote.
SOF set April 12 as the deadline last semester for student organizations to apply for funding in the 2015 fall semester. Wallace said that over 50 student organizations applied.
If this amendment passes, Wallace said it will elongate the process and require organizations to plan more than seven months in advance to prepare for their funding.
To prevent another repeat of the loophole from last year, Vrana said that the deadlines and Senate meetings need to match.
“The executive vice president and SOF committee need to set deadlines that they think would be appropriate so that if an organization needed to appeal… the Senate would be able to meet after that decision to approve or deny that request,” Vrana said.
The Senate will debate and vote again on this amendment Oct. 26.0
“I encourage the Senate to think critically about the legislation and the unintended consequences that it may create,” Wallace said. He added he specifically wants senators to think about what changes to the SOF schedule will have on student organizations’ experiences.
Wallace also said student organization feedback would be helpful as this legislation is discussed.