Whether it was lack of issues to rule on or a glimpse of utopia, today’s Senate meeting was amazingly swift. Ted asked me to join him in covering the meeting, and he was planning on leaving soon after it began. He never got the chance, however, since the meeting itself took a mere 18 minutes.

We got into the meeting a bit late, but the issues that were covered by the summer Senate were re-allocation of funds for the U of O Pre-Dental Club and the re-allocation of unused funds from the Student Payroll to Student Leadership Fund for stipends for summer Senators for June. Also, Sen. Kate Jones briefly mentioned the ethics reform that the Campaign for Change would like to implement, and gave everyone a list of examples of Codes of Ethics.

The re-allocation of funds for the Pre-Dental club was passed unanimously.

Re-allocation for the stipend failed, with 3 of the senators voting aye, and 3 abstaining. When I heard the motion come to the table, I instantly perked up. What I heard from the table was: 627 unused dollars? Let’s pay ourselves with it.
While I understand that the money would ‘go to waste’ if it was not used, I’m sure there’s a better place for it to be allocated to. The three senators that abstained did so either because they were the ones that submitted the motion, or they were not sure if they liked the idea of giving themselves money.
Don’t worry, you’ll get comfortable with doing that, soon. But I commend you for not letting yourselves get bullied into voting aye.

Examples of Codes of Ethics:

www.state.ar.us/dfa/accounting/pdf/ethics_example.pdf

www.michiganffa.com/association/membership/sample_ethics_code.doc
This is an example of how badly ethics reform is needed in the Student Senate: We’re getting tips from Future Farmers of America. Perhaps its time that some senators learn some agriculture, too.

Guidance for writing a Code of Ethics

www.ethicsweb.ca/codes/coe3.htm

Senate Ethics Manual

ethics.senate.gov/downloads/pdffiles/manual.pdf

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 18:06 by Sean Jin and is filed under ASUO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.