Committees look to the future

Stephen Useche/Contributing Writer

2012 is a new year and therefore a new beginning for everyone, and the Student Government Council at Biscayne Bay Campus is no exception. Having no Internal Affairs Chair or Rules, Legislation and Judiciary Chair at the moment gives SGC-BBC the chance to start from scratch.

Farah Yamini, former IA chair, resigned halfway into the 2011 fall semester. Then in late November , Kenya Tolliver, a recently appointed School of Journalism and Mass Communications senator, was appointed as the new IA chair.

Pablo Haspel, Speaker of the Senate, said that most people quit because they normally don’t have the time and their schedules don’t allow them to devote the necessary time to do their jobs.

All these alterations made it difficult for the IA to comply with their task, especially at the time when the impeachment charges were brought up against SCG-BBC President Denise Halpin last semester. The reason why their voice wasn’t present during the impeachment period, according to Haspel, was because Yamini, who was the IA chair at the time, was in te process of resigning for pesonal reasons.

Aside from the IA, whose duty is to make sure the Council is falling in line with the Student Government Association constitution, University wide and campus specific statutes,  there are four other committees within  SGC-BBC that have different purposes.

Finance, for instance, reviews whether a project and/or event can be funded or not; Student Advocacy, which is pretty much the mediator between the Senate and the students, makes sure that the students’ concerns are being heard; Rules, Legislation and Judiciary makes sure all legal documents are grammatically correct, and it makes the linkage between the legislative and Judicial branch of SGC-BBC; Operational Review, looks over all the expenditures, and that the money is being productively spent.

Even though, all these committees are separate, “every person from each one of them is part of the senate, so they all knew and were part of the impeachment trial,” said Haspel.

“We are pretty well represented; even though, we might not have all positions fill, we at least have one person representing all the schools on campus,” Haspel said.

Nominations are going to be opened next week for all positions.

Along trying to fill the respective senate committees with the necessary amount of representatives, there have also been some other changes within the council.

“Last year I noticed the Statutes were really embarrassing. When I became speaker, I decided to make one of our missions to fix the Statutes,” Haspel said. “The statutes had a lot of grammatical errors and were missing sections. The judiciary section was missing, and the election code was an embarrassment.”

They also wanted the BBC statutes to be in line with the Modesto Maidique Campus’ Statutes, especially when it came to the election’s code.

According to Haspel, the Senate currently has its hands full with new projects and resolutions. One of them is the creation of the Green Fee Committee, which is going to be led by Kevin Houston, School of Journalism and Mass Communication Senator.

The Green Fee Committee is responsible for finding out what students think of adding a Green Fee into tuition. The money will serve to implement environmental changes around campus.

“If you are opposed [to the fee], you can speak up and let us know,” Houston said. “The mission is to get every one’s perspective on the subject before it is put to referendum.”