A new level of seriousness and accountability was added to many Student Association positions last night at their first meeting of the semester.

After some dissention, bills passed adding interview components for the finance board, Board of Elections and Membership, Judicial Review Board, representatives to the Board of Trustees and University Senate candidates.

‘Due to the miscommunication and chaos of previous finance board deliberations, the BEM is looking to revamp the way the finance board is selected to create a smooth deliberation,’ BEM chair Jessica Cordova, said. ‘This is basically an attempt to create the ideal finance board.’

Under the new bill, the BEM will present candidates for these positions to the SA assembly with or without a recommendation based on a preliminary interview with the BEM and a mock deliberation in the case of finance board candidates.

Travis Mason, president of SA, said he thinks the organization really needs these interviews.

‘The problem is how to hold (candidates) accountable to the people they are responsible to,’ Mason said.

Comptroller Andrew Urankar said he felt the mock deliberation needed to be ironed out, but otherwise he was in support of the bill.

Cordova said students want to join the finance board for many different reasons, including to have another item to add to their resumes.

‘(The finance board bill) will be a filtering process,’ Cordova said. ‘This will add more respect for the position. There is a lot of money on the line. It is about distributing a small amount of money to a lot of organizations in the fairest way possible.’

Finance board elections will take place at the end of February for the term beginning April 1. $176,000 is left for allocation to the organizations whose bids were rejected in December. Petitions are currently available in 126 Schine Student Center.

Also, a bill passed requiring assembly members to keep two office hours a week.

‘We are representatives of the entire student body,’ Cordova said. ‘This will put a face to the SA.’

Besides two new assembly members, Sharon Clott and Peter Bjork were appointed public relations directors, Joan Gabel was appointed vice president of operations, and Eric Crites was appointed the new vice president of SA.

‘Travis and I seem to click real well,’ Crites said. ‘In order to be effective you have to be enthusiastic about what you are doing.’

While Crites was appointed for his enthusiasm and chemistry with Mason, Gabel was elected based on her thorough knowledge of SA rules.

‘A body can be run and be really exclusionary. The way I see it, the association should have a structure that facilitates everyone being heard,’ Gabel said. ‘I do run a tight ship, but, it’s not rules for rules sake, it’s rules for your sake.’

Mason also stressed his leadership philosophies at the meeting.

‘I’m a leader but I’m not a dictator,’ he said. ‘It’s not about us, it’s about the students.’

Mason also said SA will assess peaceful means to resolve university problems, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful philosophy.

Also discussed at the meeting were ‘The Big Event,’ a community service project involving the entire city of Syracuse, which coordinates with the Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s idea of getting ‘off the hill,’ and the possibility for an SA Web site with its own domain.

Chief of Staff Harris Sokoloff said the hope would be for the site to include a calendar of all university events and e-mail addresses for all student organizations. Sokoloff said the domain name would cost about $8 a year.

Published on January 24, 2005 at 12:00 pm