SGB begins new year with hopes for transparency

All new members of Student Government Board said they were “excited” to start working after… All new members of Student Government Board said they were “excited” to start working after a group retreat during which the Board collectively agreed on initiatives for the new year.

Initiatives such as “Behind the Glass Door” represent the semester’s new direction and focus of the Board, which met publicly for the first time at last night’s meeting.

Board President Charlie Shull explained the initiative.

The Board hopes to “hold open houses for students to come in the office and see what work we specifically do. This is toward the overall goal of more transparency for the Student Government Board,” Shull said.

SGB experienced its first minor controversy over an allocations request. SGB denied Hillel Jewish University Center’s request for $5,726 to host a dating-violence awareness program.

Campus Women’s Organization, Rainbow Alliance, Panhellenic Council and the Cross-Cultural and Leadership Development co-sponsored the event.

The Board denied the request in full because “The event did not coincide with the mission statement of Hillel,” Board member David Gau said.

Hillel’s mission statement, according to its website, is, “Our mission is to enrich the lives of Jewish students so that they may enrich the Jewish people and the world.”

The “Dating-Violence Awareness Program” planned to bring a speaker from Florida to campus for four days in February.

Five students from Hillel would accompany the speaker and engage in role playing different dating situations.

Josh Glass, Hillel’s business manager, was frustrated with the verdict.

“This was a really wide-ranging event — very different organizations,” Glass said. “To hear that it doesn’t coincide with our statement, I really don’t think that that’s fair.”

Glass said that if SGB is acknowledging the event could be a productive social action project, he didn’t think it mattered who ran it.

James Weaver, president of Rainbow Alliance, said it was hard to protest the decisions without first knowing the reasons.

“We don’t hear what the reasons are behind their decisions until we’re at the Board meeting, and once we’re here, since we don’t have time to prepare ourselves, we can’t defend the decisions,” Weaver said.

Weaver said he thinks the discussion should be held at Board meetings so people are aware of the Board’s thought process.

Previous boards didn’t require the allocations committee to give groups all information about allocations.

Shull said he thinks he has some ideas for addressing Rainbow Alliance’s concerns, but he didn’t want to promise anything without discussing his ideas with the allocations chair first.

Shull said he thought about asking the allocations chair to instruct each group’s liason on the committee to inform groups of the committee’s recommendations before the Board votes on them.

The Board also announced two officer positions yesterday.

Gau will serve as the Board’s president pro-tempore, and Ali Noorbaksh will serve as business manager.