AS Senate Recap – 4/2/25
This recap first appeared in the April 7 edition of the KCSB News Weekly Newsletter.
The AS Senate is a group of elected student representatives which serves as the policy-making body of Associated Students. Every Wednesday at 6:30 PM, the AS Senate convenes to pass bills and resolutions, hear reports from Boards, Committees, and Units (BCUs), and hold public forum.
KCSB’s Joyce Chi summarizes what happened at their April 2 meeting.
It’s a Spring Quarter miracle! The first meeting back was only two hours long, the shortest in recent memory. Let’s review what happened.
The meeting began with a quick debate: Should students running for Senate be allowed to serve as proxies for current Senators during the meeting? The issue arose because Senator and first president pro tempore Dan Siddiqui sought to have a candidate serve as his proxy after 8:30 PM (which, given the meeting’s mercifully short duration, was ultimately unnecessary).
Senator Mingjun Zha said candidates should not be allowed to proxy for Senators, citing election fairness and hopes of preventing candidates from having undue influence. Conversely, Senator Taylor Iden said they should be allowed to proxy, because the more experience they have before coming to the Senate, the better. In the end, they approved candidate proxies for the meeting.
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In public forum, two speakers questioned the Senate about transparency. The concerns of Kamaya Jackson, the co-chair of the Black Women’s Health Collaborative (BWHC) and Queen Allah, BWHC’s External Needs Advocate, relate to Jackson’s bid to be appointed as co-chair of the Student Commission on Racial Equity (SCORE).
The Senate indefinitely tabled this appointment at their March 5 meeting, and it remains as such. They partly cited the novelty of having one person serve as a chair for two organizations, but also referred to previous closed session discussions and an investigation by the Student Advocate General. The Senate entered another closed session at the March 5 meeting to further discuss Jackson’s appointment to SCORE.
In a printed-out newsletter set on each seat of the Flying A Room, Jackson claimed that Associated Students (AS) “officials manipulated procedures to exclude her” and that her case is “a continuation of the deeply entrenched racial discrimination in AS.” During public forum, Jackson and Allah both questioned why the decision to table the appointment was made in closed session instead of on public record. Owing to the nature of closed session discussions, the Senate did not directly answer their questions.
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Should AS members be able to receive pay from outside the association? That’s a question Chief Compliance Officer David Jr. Sim posed to the Senate. He explained that the state of California wants to give a financial stipend to AS President Nayali Broadway and Executive Vice President for Local Affairs (EVPLA) Owen Meyers for the work their offices have continued on an education campaign started by AS officials last year.
This Raise the Bar campaign focuses on bystander intervention and the relationship between alcohol and sexual violence among local “nightlife bar owners employees/employers, decision-makers, organizations, and communities.”
Sim recommended the Senate to allow the external pay in this case, then write legislation to address this in AS Legal Code for the future. The Senate will vote on Sim’s recommendation at an upcoming meeting.
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The bill establishing Raíces de mi Tierra as a BCU needs to be rewritten, Sim said, citing compliance issues with financial policy and Legal Code. One cited issue was that many of the positions within Raíces are listed as “chairs,” which Sim wrote “brings up the question of honoraria” and would require these positions to all be approved by the AS President.
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The Senate unanimously passed a resolution in honor of and inspired by a recently deceased UCSB student. Micheal Ma and Mason Ryan died in a March 17 car crash in Camarillo; Senator Enri Lala, the resolution’s author, called them “beloved and really bright members of the community.” The resolution says that a couple years ago, Ma informed Lala that UCSB students were among the few at a major U.S. college that didn’t have access to a financial software program.
Bloomberg Terminal on Campus, the legislation describes, is “a computer software system empowering students to monitor advanced real-time financial market data” that provides opportunities for trading and accessing commodities data. Lala said these were “things that students will need to build a strong career path for themselves.”
The Micheal Ma Service to Economics Students Act directs Sean Lieberman, the Acting AS Executive Director, “to begin work on introducing Bloomberg Terminals to all interested undergraduate students.” The resolution’s authors said they may also collaborate with the economics and statistics & data sciences departments on this initiative.
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The Senate tabled two bills for one week, as required by Legal Code.
The first, A Bill to Peg AS Judicial Council’s Honoraria to Senate Standing Committees, would upgrade the scale of payment for the AS Judicial Council (JC). Senator Zha, a former JC member, said that the Council works many hours and should thus be paid at the level of Senate Standing Committees. Senator Taylor Iden expressed hesitation that raising JC’s honoraria would be a financial strain: “Increases are extremely hard with our current capacity.”
The second, A Bill to Revise the GGC Legal Code, would codify changes in the By-Laws sought by the Global Gaucho Commission (GGC) for their organization. Some revisions include GGC having one Chair and one Vice-Chair, instead of the current two Co-Chair positions, and folding the duties of the Cultural Awareness and Mental Health Advocates under one Policy Director position.
Access this week’s AS Senate agenda (which includes their bills and resolutions) using your student email here. You can see last week’s agenda here. Meetings are typically held each week at the Flying A Room of the University Center (Main Floor) throughout the quarter, aside from Week 10. You can also watch live and past meetings on Facebook here.
Find all our previous Senate Recaps here.