Today Student Government Association posted the official language that will be on the ballot for next week’s elections, held April 5-7.

Issues up for vote include the election of a student body president and vice president, senior class president, five proposals for uses of Wyrick Funds and a potential increase in the Student Involvement Fee.

Jacob Swett and Justin Mellish are running unopposed for President and Vice-President of SGA, although students do have an option to vote “no confidence.”

Two candidates are running for Senior Class President; John Gauthier and Corey Honer.

A proposed $9 increase in the Student Involvement Fee is up for a vote, which would up the fee to $26 .The Student Involvement Fee is used by Student Activities Council to sponsor campus events.

As for the Wyrick proposals, the theme this year appears to be signs, banners and marquees.

One projects asks for funding for large campus maps near visitor parking to better direct newcomers around campus at a cost of about $15,500.

Another project involves planting beds with the Missouri State name set in steel letters with back-lighting at a cost of roughly $82,800.

The third project on the ballot asks for about $19,600 to put banners on 68 light poles around campus and paint some campus fences with the Missouri State colors and logo.

For $43,600, students are asked for money to install electronic marquees that will display current events and emergency information to be located in various high-traffic campus areas.

The final Wyrick proposal on the ballot asks to install an electronic counter in Bear Park South to display the number of open parking spaces currently available at a cost of $74,700.

Wyrick funds will go to projects with the most student votes first and then down the line until the funds are depleted.

The full ballot language can be found online at http://sga.missouristate.edu/. Language of the Wyrick proposals is copied below.

Issue 3: Wyrick Fund Project Proposals 2010

Listed below are Wyrick Fund Project Proposals for 2010. You may vote to approve all, some, or none of the projects. Projects will be funded in the order of votes received until the fund is exhausted or until the cost of the projects exceed the amount remaining in the fund.

1)      Wayfinding Signage

a.       This proposal recommends that new basic double-sided wayfinding signs be installed at the entrance of the Visitor Parking Lot (Lot 13), outside the south entrance to Baker Bookstore near the Plaster Student Union, and at the northwest corner of Carrington Hall.  These signs should be roughly 4 foot by 4 foot.  A final sign should also be located at the southeast corner of the Visitor Parking Lot (Lot 13) that is more significant to drive individuals into the main corridor, and it should include both a permanent map and a location for individuals to take their own personal campus map.   This sign should be roughly 4 foot by 6 foot.  These signs should include lettering and directional arrows on both sides pointing to the four major landmarks.  The signs should also be unified in appearance, strongly influenced by Missouri State University colors (Maroon, White, Gray, and Black), and should include strong elements of the university logo.  The total cost of this project would be $15,550.

2)      Four Corner Signage

a.        The proposal includes a half-oval shaped planting bed with a base made to reflect the limestone (including the red-tinted rock) featured in many of the buildings on the main quad to be installed. Furthermore , it would include  four pillars (also made to reflect the limestone) be erected around the new planting beds that have panels and tops that reflect architectural details seen on Carrington Hall.   We also recommend that the current lettering on the cement facades being removed and be replaced with a large stainless steel plate with “Missouri State” cut out of it in the current university lettering.  This lettering should be backlit.  The project also incudes stainless steel plates with cut-out lettering and backlighting be installed at the other three secondary locations.  Total cost for this project is $82,836.

3)      Light Pole Banners and Fence Painting

a.       This proposal would install 68 Banners on light poles in Lots 13 , 15, 18, 22, 25, 35, 38, 40, and 43 that would be designed by a commission of students to promote school spirit, and the fence facing lot 15, the fences facing east towards national, and the fences facing north towards Grand would all be painted with Missouri State Lettering and the Missouri State Bear head logo.  The Total cost for this project would be $19,586

4)      Current Event Marquees

a.       This proposal would install 12 current event marquee screens, to be located in the dining centers, the library, the student union, Bear Park North and South, Park Central Office building, and Brick City that would display current events on the Missouri State Campus, along with emergency notifications.  The total cost for this project would be $43,661

5)      Bear Park South Parking Counter

a.       This proposal would install a car counting system in Bear Park south that would calculate the number of open spaces in the garage and display those on two signs located near the entrances for the garage.  Those signs would also include a variable message system that could display messages such as “Event Parking” or “Upper level closed due to weather.”  The total cost for this proposal is $74,704.70

“Live bears” across Missouri breathed a sigh of relief this week.

Student Body President Chris Polley announced the University has squashed the Student Government Association’s plans to bring a “live bear” to football games. No reason was given outside the administration’s discomfort with the idea.

I’m glad this “live bear” idea didn’t materialize because I don’t think keeping a bear captive for our amusement is something an institution of higher education should do.

But the effort to capture, collar, and cage a “live bear,” though misguided, was aimed at addressing a legitimate issue. That issue is the lack of school spirit among the students. Granted, every third freshman is wearing maroon, but what does that mean? How does that manifest in a sense of community as students?

The activities email I get every week has events the University is putting on and some by student groups. Where is, for lack of a more precise term, the voice of the students? I don’t mean things done for students, but actions taken by students, as students and not as some group.

For example, there were a few articles about the controversy last year with SGA and the money for Eagles tickets, but widespread protest? Calls for accountability? None.

Earlier this month, many campuses demonstrated in solidarity against a wave of cuts in education funding and tuition hikes. It’s not just California and their 32 percent increase.

Michigan, South Carolina, and Colorado students are looking at increases. Our freeze isn’t going to hold forever. There were over one hundred protests nationwide. Nary a word here.

Now we have this new fitness center being built while everyone holds their breath, waiting for budget cuts. Does this make sense? Even if the fitness center money was “set aside” by a student vote, doesn’t that call for a review and change of the system for allocating these funds? We shouldn’t be locked into spending millions of dollars by students who aren’t here anymore and barely gave a second thought to a building being constructed five years down the road.

RHA is considering converting Brick City into loft style “on campus” housing. Meanwhile, we’re plowing under actual “on campus” land to build special swimming pools in our new fitness center.

We have to slash our budget and risk tuition hikes somewhere down the line so we can fund this fluff. Is housing located further away from campus really what we need? How will that help build school spirit?

Students shrug it off for the most part. They are passionate in their own little spheres, but as a student body, they are uninterested in the course set for the University by the administration.

What would a “live bear” do? Bears live their lives almost entirely alone and spend a good chunk of that time sleeping. It’s somehow fitting that we would think to bring a solitary, territorial predator to try to draw people together.

Low attendance at some sporting events isn’t due to lack of spectacle. It is a symptom of a deeper lack of community among the students.

Until the root problem is addressed, all the “live bears” or maroon t-shirts in the world won’t make a difference.

Or, if you do the math, three printed pages per week, per class.

Student Government Association seems to think that is all students deserve to print at the open computer labs on campus, a place students pay a fee to use.

Assuming the average student enrolls in 15 hours each semester (30 hours and 10 classes total for the year) for the roughly 30-week school year, that rounds out to only three printed pages per class, per week in order to avoid exceeding the 500-page limit.

Those three pages for a week of class must cover printed notes, papers, assignments, and whatever else a professor asks students to print.

Were students really beating down the doors begging Student Government Association to limit our printing privileges to 500 pages a year?

You’d think so, given the little signs SGA put out now sitting next to every lab computer terminal on campus that say we did.

For supposedly going green, we wonder how much paper and ink they used printing out those signs?

Couldn’t they have just wrote it on the desktop backgrounds?

In any case, SGA does not seem to have to do much to enforce this quota.

Computer technicians have to worry about implementing and maintaining the system, while lab employees must decide whether to grant or deny extra printing requests.

SGA members just get to sit back, vote to impose a printing quota on the rest of us, and make it appear they are doing something for the environment and the school’s budget.

SGA computers are not located in an open lab, so they can still print as much as they want, whenever they want.

Unfortunately, the students (SGA’s constituents) are the people who will be harmed by this capricious decision.

Some students will avoid the computer labs once they reach the imposed limit, instead printing on their own home ink jets (costing the student money), while other students will just ask to have their printing limit exceeded.

If SGA really wants to get serious about saving paper and money, why allow students to extend the limit so easily? Either set a limit or don’t. Doing neither wastes everyone’s time.

We seriously doubt lab employees really are going to sift through a students print jobs to make sure they are academic-related. Honestly, that should not be their job anyway.

Okay, so one student printed over 25,000 pages last year. That is a ridiculous waste of money, ink, and paper. However, the whole campus should not be punished over the actions of one student.

Instead of a printing limit, we have a better solution to the problem. As before, student printer usage should be monitored by software. However, students should not be limited in printing privileges.

At the end of the year, any student who prints an excessive amount of copies is subject to a print review by members of an SGA board. If, after examining a student’s print jobs, SGA finds that an overabundance of non-academic prints were made, then that student would be required to pay five-cents per-page for anything over 500 pages.

Voila. Under this plan, students would limit their print jobs to academic purposes to avoid the fine, the campus saves paper, ink, and money, students following the rules can print their academic work as needed, and the burden of policing the mandate transfers back to members of SGA, where it belongs.

Going green doesn’t have to mean going cheap.

-Zach Becker

For the Editorial Board

Assistant Editor

The question has been bugging me.  Is the Student Government Association subject to Missouri’s Sunshine Law?  In the article I wrote for the April 8th issue, I made sure to say that SGA wasn’t in compliance with the law, and not say violating the law, because I wasn’t sure whether the law applied.

The law describes several types of “Public Governmental Bodies” which basically breaks down as any organ of the state or any body given authority by the state to spend tax money.  The law also specifically mentions the governing bodies of state universities, such as our Board of Governors, as subject to the law.

SGA is not part of the Missouri state government.  It’s a creation of the school to represent the students.  However, it seemed to me that SGA does spend public money in the form of the state’s grant to the school.

The mystery lingered until I happened to be reading the CJB Policies and Procedures (because I’m a hopeless geek).  One section of the policies reads, “As per a decision made by the Attorney General in 1989, the Student Government Association and all branches thereof (executive, legislative, and judicial) are not subject to the Missouri Sunshine law.”  So I guess that settles it.

Not quite.

After wandering lost and confused on the Missouri Attorney General’s website, I found that the opinion CJB is referring to was rendered in 1987, not 1989.  If someone can find an ’89 opinion on the site related to SGA, please let me know.

Also, the AG issues opinions, not “decisions.”  Decisions are made by courts.  You’d think the CJB would realize the distinction.

The opinion says that SGA is not a Public Governmental Body unless it acts with delegated authority from the Board of Governors or exercises de facto authority with the tacit approval of the Board.

The attorney general is pretty clear on his stand, but his opinion is just that, an opinion.  A very well informed opinion, but an opinion nonetheless.  It doesn’t have the force of law.  The only way to find out for sure is to bring the matter before a judge and have the judge interpret the law.  That would be a “decision.”

And there is language in the Sunshine Law describing “advisory committees” at the direction of a Public Governing Body who recommend policy revisions on expenditure of public funds.  I think an argument could be made that SGA was acting as such an “advisory committee” when it recommended the sustainability fee to the Board of Governors, and in other such actions that involve public money.

So I think it’s a bit misleading for CJB to say that the Sunshine Law doesn’t apply.  It would be more apt to say it probably doesn’t apply, or we believe it doesn’t apply.

Ultimately, whether SGA is or is not subject to Sunshine isn’t the point.  My new question is, why not just adopt the Sunshine Law standards voluntarily?

They really aren’t all that strict.  The law mainly requires that all records be made available and that a custodian of records be responsible for handling record requests.  It also has some other basic requirements about posting meeting times and the format of meeting minutes.  That’s it.

You can dream up other punishments besides the $1,000 fines outlined in the law.  Just so long as you have a commitment to keeping a complete, continuous record of operation.

This is the easy stuff, folks.  Anyone in government should want to become more open, it’s not controversial.  A good step in that direction would be for SGA to embrace the spirit of the Sunshine Law, and not hide behind a twenty year old opinion from the Attorney General.

(That Attorney General, by the way, was William L. Webster.  Six years after he issued this opinion, he pleaded guilty and got two years on charges of embezzlement and fraud.)

As the Student Government Association transitions into the 2009-2010 session, the new administration would do well to look into record-keeping practices at SGA that are at best suspicious and at worst illegal.

On February 23, The Underground requested SGA budget and attendance records going back to 2005, the year that SGA became wholly funded by student fees.

It took 18 days for SGA to produce this year’s budget, and no explanation for the delay was given outside of being busy.

The attendance information provided for the current year was incomplete, as it didn’t list the names or total number in attendance for many of the meetings.

Courtney Wendell, a junior and SGA’s director of public relations, referred reporters to the SGA archive in Meyer Library to obtain attendance and budget information from previous years. However, there were no recent attendance records on file, and the most recent complete budget in the archive dates back to 1993.

Missouri’s Sunshine Law states that all records of public governmental bodies, with certain explicit exceptions, shall be open to public inspection.

The law also mandates that such bodies appoint a custodian of records, who will respond within three business days in writing to any records request.

It also states that in the minutes of public meetings, a record of members both absent and present will be included.

Currently, SGA minutes do not include information on attendance.

Jon Stubblefield, sophomore and SGA’s sergeant-at-arms, said that sign-in sheets, the method of taking attendance at Senate meetings, are used primarily to track absences and determine if a quorum is present.

“When I first took on the position, I don’t know if I counted everyone in attendance,” Stubblefield said, “but since January I’ve had a numerical count.”

Overall attendance numbers and trends are not collected or reported to anyone.

Additionally, in the Bylaws of the Senate, Article I, Section 2, Paragraph A states that minutes will be available in the Senate office and, “on the SGA website no later than 5 p.m. one day prior to the next meeting.”

The minutes from February 17, 24 and from March 3 were not posted on the website until March 13.
As of press time, minutes from SGA meetings since March 3 are not on the website.

Far from a small matter, Article IV, Section 9, Paragraph D of the SGA Constitution states that SGA officers are subject to impeachment by the Senate for, “failure to uphold this constitution and its bylaws.”

SGA does not have a custodian of records position, but Ashley Hoyer, junior and SGA’s chief of staff, said that she is in charge of keeping records and uploading minutes to the website.

SGA has no equivalent to an inspector general or government accountability office, according to Hoyer.

“Our Senate is our accountability office,” she said. However, in the SGA Constitution, the Senate is not given the power to conduct investigations, compel witnesses, or audit records.

Without a complete record, nor a clear charge of responsibility for checking and auditing records, accountability becomes impossible.

For example, Wendell said there were significant decreases in the amount of payroll taken by the cabinet in the past couple of years.

“I’ve only taken six hours (of payroll) this semester. Whitney (Paul) works entirely for free,” Wendell said.

As of December 2008, salaries in the current budget accounted for 40 cents of the one dollar charge each student pays to support SGA. This is roughly in line with the amount spent in 1993 (thirty-nine percent).

But, without recent budgets to compare, it’s impossible to gauge how much progress is being made in saving money, or even whether Wendell’s statement is accurate.

The SGA Senate Archival Act of 2009, passed on February 3 of this year, begins to address the problem of record keeping.

It mandates that all resolutions, memoranda, executive papers, and Campus Judicial Board decisions be delivered to the library archive and that all those documents from the current session and the past two sessions be available in SGA’s Document Management System, a computer based system.

However, attendance and voting records are not addressed in the act and neither are budgets.

There is also no mention of a system for organizing the records or summarizing their content, making it onerous for students or SGA members to sift meaningful information from the data.

The act does not create a system for handling open record requests, nor does it charge any officer or committee with investigating and auditing records.

Nick Maddux, leader of the College Republicans and a former SGA Senator, said accountability is the number one issue that needs to be addressed in the Senate, and that a better system of accountability would help attract and retain quality Senators.

“You have thirty or so Senators that are good Senators, that do their office hours,” he said. “I’ll bet half the Senate doesn’t sit their office hours.”

Maddux said that he thinks some Senators use their position primarily to pad their resumes.

“Not all, but some Senators speak out and raise motions just to make it look like they’re doing something,” he said.

In fact, some of its practices may be in violation of Missouri’s Sunshine Law, which requires government entities to make available information about their meetings and activities to the general public.

But rather than pointing fingers and placing blame, we instead are calling SGA to action.

It is time to appoint an independent SGA auditor, a person paid to assist in record keeping, but also given the authority to make sure SGA meets all open record requirements as spelled out in Missouri’s Sunshine Law.

The independent auditor should also generate weekly reports about SGAs activities and provide them online for the students.

It is time to hold our governing body accountable for its actions. It is impossible for students to make accurate judgments concerning the performance of individual senators and SGA as a whole when simple documents like budgets, attendance, and voting records are either unavailable or incomplete.

SGA touts itself as the “official voice of the student body at Missouri State University,” according to its website.
It is time for it to start acting the part and get its house in order with proper, responsible record keeping.

With the upcoming transition to a new administration, now is a perfect time for SGA to make the necessary changes and appoint an independent auditor.

-Zach Becker
For the Editorial Board

cover design by Jon Simons

The reason.

Insufficient attendance by senators at the meeting to pass the vote.

While the SGA attendance issue is somewhat troubling, more troubling is the fact that any student senators would be in favor of increasing student fees.

Sure, $2 a semester per student doesn’t sound like much, but students are already being asked to carry a huge burden between current tuition and student fees. Most students leave college with thousands of dollars in debt.

Increasing student fees is not an idea that should be thrown around lightly in SGA, especially for a project rife with good intentions but less so with concrete steps and measurable objectives.

Sustainability is a noble idea, but it doesn’t require student fees to fund it. The best ways to promote sustainability involve simply increasing awareness. Turn off the lights when not in a room. Recycle aluminum cans and paper products. Carpool to work and school.

Students should be appalled that SGA senators would even consider increasing fees in this economic environment, especially as the university administration is working to keep tuition flat even as costs and enrollment continue to rise.

If this sustainability measure is brought back up before a full senate, it should be voted down.

If it passes through SGA and goes to a student vote, then students need to stand up and make it clear that they oppose any increase in the economic burden we all face.

Student fee increases will not be tolerated.

-Zach Becker

For the Editorial Board

Contributor

As the Public Affairs theme for 2009 at Missouri State University, sustainability has caused a lot of talk on campus the past few months. But what does the term mean specifically in the university context, and what might the sustainability proposition bring about for students?

The 2009 Referendum for a Sustainability Fee brought to vote at Student Government Association defines the term generally as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

More specifically, the proposed resolution would require a $2 student fee increase per semester for each student. Courtney Wendel, Director of Public Relations for SGA, explained that the money would go into a fund and then be allocated by a commission of students who decide which projects to support.

As far as the exact allocation of funds, part of the money would go to support recycling, but the majority would be in the hands of the students. Various groups and organizations on campus will apply for funding in order to host speakers, events and other projects associated with sustainability. Then, the students on the commission will consider suggestions and choose where to distribute the funds.

Although the initial vote failed in the senate during the last SGA meeting, plans to reinstate the proposition are expected to come within the next month.

“There is discussion about bringing it back up,” Wendel said. “We’re just waiting on a timeline.”

The text of the resolution itself raised some controversy among Senators of SGA. Some were “concerned that it was biased,” Wendel explained.

In the original language of the resolution, part of the text involved background information explaining the benefits of sustainability and the reasons for the referendum. Various lines were debated upon and cut by the SGA Senate, but according to Wendel, “The actual referendum clause itself did not change at all.”

At this point, the university has agreed to match up to $75,000 of the funds, meaning $150,000 overall could be raised to support the sustainability projects. However, that possibility remains available only within the present budget. Since the next Board of Governors meeting in April will discuss university funds for the upcoming year, the updated budget may not include the potential to match if the referendum has not passed.

Despite some of the controversy over the resolution, a passing vote in the Senate would not mean an immediate $2 increase in tuition. “The resolution is about giving the students the opportunity to vote,” Wendel clarified. If passed in the senate, the resolution would be brought before student vote so that the student body could make the final decision.