The Oswego State Student Association meeting was canceled last week due to lack of  available senators again. SA is struggling to meet the minimum number of student senators required to hold meetings.

SA rules require 12 senators to be present in order to conduct business. However, SA only has 12 senators at this point of the semester.

“Usually, at the beginning of every semester, there is some type of turnover because people take classes during time that senate is,” said Edward Kelly, vice president of SA. “Obviously, we aren’t going to ask them to put their senate before classes. That wouldn’t be fair to them.”

While a loss of senators is expected every semester, this semester posed a challenge.

“We had a large amount of students who had conflicts with classes,” Kelly said. “People come in and out, but this semester, it just happened all at once.”

Without the minimum number of senators present, SA cannot conduct its official function, most importantly, deciding how to allocate the SA budget to student groups and clubs.

“It was to the point where we are just at 12 or 13 senators right now. We need 12 to meet quorum,” Kelly said. “We had so many drop out because of those class conflicts that we now have to do a big recruiting campaign again.”

The quorum rule is in place to ensure the proper number of senators are present so students are adequately represented, Kelly said. If too few senators are present, it would be unfair for those few to make decisions that affect the entire student body.

SA budget totals at nearly $2 million annually, according to Kelly, with an annual contingency budget of $10,000. This contingency fund is used if a student group requests additional funding during the year. The senate hears and votes on the request.

“Clubs come in and they ask us for additional funds if they need it,” Kelly said.

Without SA meetings, clubs may find difficulty getting the additional funding.

“If a club is like, ‘We have an event that’s coming up in a month, two months,’ and they came to us last semester, we can’t hold that against them because we haven’t been able to be in session,” Kelly explained.

An example of this situation is the Ski and Snowboard Club on campus, which requested funds for a trip to Bristol Mountain Ski Resort about 80 miles away, near Rochester, New York. The trip was approved by the SA finance committee last semester but has not received approval by the Senate body due to the lack of quorum requirements.

In this circumstance, SA president Omar van Reenen issued an executive order, sponsored by Kelly, to grant Ski and Snowboard Club funding for their trip.

“Because it’s been approved by the committee, I felt as the president, I can use my executive privilege and executive order to give them the money without the senate vote so that these students could go on this trip and reap their student activity fees,” van Reenen said. “It’s the students’ money, and that offers them the opportunity to take part in a club, and that’s why SA is here.”

Kelly and van Reenen are exploring options for solving the lack of senators both now and in the future.

“By making different resolutions, we’ve gotten more students interested in SA,” van Reenen said. “I’ve gotten a lot of messages about ‘How can I get involved?,’ ‘Where can I get petitions?,’ so forth.”

To prevent a problem where too few senators halt senate duties, Kelly is exploring further options.

“If this does happen again, where we’re three weeks, four weeks into the semester and we can’t meet quorum, how do we get out of that?” Kelly said. “Is there something we can maybe give the executives more power to cover that while we wait for more senator’s petitions. We’re looking at all options.”

Students interested in becoming an SA senator can pick up a petition form at The Point office in Marano Campus Center. To become a senator representing the residence hall in which they reside, prospective senators need the signatures of 50 residents from that hall, while “at large” senators representing the overall student body need 100 signatures from any Oswego State student.

“I think we can have a maximum of 60 senators,” van Reenen said. “The students should really see this as an opportunity and avenue to push this campus forward by joining Student Association.”

Photo by Julia Tilley | The Oswegonian