Last night the referendum to amend the Student Council constitution passed with the support of 92.3 percent of student voters.
"I am very pleased with these results," said amendment sponsor Jack Wilson, outgoing vice president of administration. "It's been a project we've been working on all last semester and this semester. We tried to fix space allocation issues and also tried to clarify roles that everyone had on Council."
According to outgoing Chief of Staff Ryan McElveen, these changes were mainly proposed for the purpose of clarifying the Council constitution for students.
"The primary goal [of the referendum] was to make the document more readable to the common public," McElveen said.
He added that the new constitution, which has clearer language, will more easily allow students to gain access to necessary information they may have found difficult to find before.
According to outgoing College Rep. Todd Eley, this referendum also changed the representative structure of Council by removing of the cap that controls the number of representatives of the body. The referendum states that the number of representatives per school will be determined by how many students are currently enrolled in that school, regardless of the populations of other schools.
"We made it so a school's population determines its representation on Council, not its population in comparison to other schools," he said. "There is one representative for every 1,000 students in each school."
The change to the representative structure also extends to the creation of new seats for first-year and transfer representatives, Eley said. He explained that two to three representative seats will be taken away from the College and reserved for first-year and transfer students. He also noted that for those schools that did not have the required 1,000 first-year or transfer students to create a seat, a different system of representation would be developed.
Eley also said these changes would include an easier way to "make committees flexible." The referendum will now allow Council to create committees without having them individually stated in the constitution.
According to Wilson, this referendum extends and does a better job of explaining the roles of the executive officers, including the executive vice president, whose title is now chair of the representative body.
"We didn't change their roles, we just made it so anyone could open the constitution and understand who they need to talk to," he said, "If you're a student and want to contact your representative, you know who you can contact and because you can read that section in the constitution. [This referendum] makes it easier for students to contact Student Council."
Now that the referendum has passed, Council's next job will be to pass bylaws that will work along with this newly amended constitution, according to Wilson.
"We can hopefully vote within 30 days, before the transition of the new representative body," Eley said. "The key thing is we don't want new people coming in who are having to take over this issue."
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