SGA Explores Activities Fee Increase

By Annie McGrew Staff Writer

In its weekly meeting this Monday, the 48th Legislature of the Student Government Association (SGA) discussed six bills, but none were voted on since it was the first readings of all the bills.

Each bill got assigned to a committee, and the respective committees will give recommendations at next week's meeting.

Bill 48s108, which aims to raise the Student Activities Fee (SAF) to account for inflation, and Bill 48s109, which seeks to modify the Cost of Living Adjustment (CoLA) to account for inflation, were both submitted by College junior and SGA President Jon Darby and College senior and Vice President for Finance Patrick O'Leary. The two bills were assigned to all committees.

According to Darby, the SAF has consistently been lagging behind inflation, and this has been crippling students' buying power.

Currently, the CoLA to the SAF is 3 percent every four years. Darby and O'Leary would like to change the CoLA to be updated yearly to better keep up with inflation.

Additionally, College junior and SGA Vice President Raj Tilwa discussed the outcome of the second Community Conversations, a discussion forum designed to obtain student input on critical issues on campus, which occurred last week. At the conversation last week, students gave their input on Campus Dining and how it could be improved.

As a result of the input from the Community Conversations, SGA representatives discussed reimagining Dooley's Den, or the Zaya restaurant. They also discussed the upcoming renewal of the Sodexo dining contract in 2015.

Goizueta Business School junior and SGA Chief of Staff Adam Goldstein talked about the TableTalk application that closed on Friday. Overall, there were 92 applications, and the applicants were all undergraduates. Goldstein plans to reach out to graduate students to see if they are interested.

Max Zoberman, College sophomore and SGA campus services chairman, mentioned that his committee is working on a system where students can preload printing. His idea is similar to how laundry usage now works at freshman residential halls, where a student pays a certain amount every semester to use the service. Zoberman would like to install a similar system for printing.

The Task Force on Campus Safety and Crisis Prevention Technologies shared their plans of identifying certain areas on campus and evaluating what can be done to make these areas safer. They plan to do walkthroughs and evaluations of these areas throughout the end of the semester.

Besides the two Bills 48s108 and 48s109, there were four nomination bills, all of which were assigned to the governance committee. Four students were nominated as Associate Justice of Emory Constitutional Council. The governance committee will interview the candidates and vote whether they feel the candidate is right for the position of not. All candidates have already been nominated by the constitutional council and now are in the process of legislative approval.

– By Annie McGrew, Staff Writer

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