To be placed on the ballot, a candidate for the offices of President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, or Senator-At-Large must pick up a petition in the SGA office and return it, with twenty undergraduate signatures tomorrow, February 9. While the responsibilities of the executive offices are pretty self-explanatory (just look at the SGA By-laws on the web), the three Senator-At-Large positions may not be so well-known. Basically, the student body elected fourteen off-campus and twelve on-campus senators in A-term, and the entire student body will now together elect three senators whose constituents are not based solely on or off-campus.
On Thursday of this week, there will be a Meet the Candidates "Debate" at 4:30 in the Lower Wedge. This is an opportunity for the student body to meet each candidate, ask questions, and hear about the issues each candidate hopes to tackle if elected. At that time, candidates must also submit their letters of candidacy to the SGA Secretary for printing in next week's issue of Newspeak.
After a lottery conducted on Friday to determine the order of candidates on the official ballot, the polls will open at midnight on Thursday, February 15. Students can use the sgavote program on the WPI network to submit their votes through Sunday, February 18. The next day, Monday, February 19, the polls will reopen, this time in Daniels Mailroom, for paper balloting.
On this week's agenda:
Last week, the Senate had no business to discuss, so the meeting was adjourned early. This week, however, the Senate has several items of both old business (tabled from previous meetings) and new business (bills which have never been considered by the Senate).
First off, last week, President Connelly asked the Senate to approve her appointment of three new senators: Jonathan Chaillet (CS '98), James (Ben) Petro (BBT '97), and Christopher Mello (MIS '96).
Another item of old business is the Undergraduate Social Fee Restructuring Proposal, which was sent back to the Appropriations Committee for further work at a meeting held two weeks ago. This week, the committee is scheduled to report on their activities regarding the proposal and their intended action - it is feasible that they will choose to withdraw the motion completely and submit a new motion, perhaps a call for a referendum, in its place. Were the committee to call for a referendum, the student body would vote on the issue of raising the social fee during the C-term elections.
Under new business, the Appropriations Committee will submit two requests for special funding, one from the Music Association (Class III) for about $5000 and another for the Actuarial Club (Class I) for $1300. The Class III Organizational Class Finance Committee (OCFC) voted to grant Music Association's request, which would partially fund the Glee Club's upcoming tour of Ireland and England during Spring Break. The group has done a lot of fund-raising this year to cover the costs, but they still came up short. Appropriations Committee will recommend to the Senate that they approve the request. The Actuarial Club's request is for the purpose of purchasing exam books for students taking actuarial exams. Class I OCFC voted to grant their request, and the Appropriations Committee will recommend passage of this request as well.
The third and final item of business on the agenda will be from the Policies and Procedures Committee, a committee of senators which maintain and develop SGA's governing documents (Constitution, By-Laws, and Rules of Operation). The committee will meet before Tuesday's meeting to draft an amendment to the Senate's Rules of Operation which would reduce the number of committees on which each senator must serve from two to one. The rationale behind this is that the time commitment required to actively serve on more than one committee is too high to be required and that there are too many people on certain committees to make getting any work done easy. Hopefully, reducing the number of committees on which senators must serve will cut down on the number of inactive members.
Once again, it looks like it could be a long meeting, as well as a long term for the Senate. In the background, OCFCs for Classes I, II, and III are holding budget hearings for each student organization, and the Senate will be voting on the overall Student Government Budget in the beginning of D-term. (The Student Government Budget includes the budgets of each student group along with the Senate operating budget for the next fiscal year.) A lot of changes were made to the budgeting process for this year and it appears that more could be on the way, depending upon who the new Treasurer will be.
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