For years, LSU’s Student Government has missed key components of the state’s open meetings law — in particular, the requirement to make meeting agendas available ahead of time to the public. This school year, student leaders have worked toward greater compliance, though there is still progress to be made.

The open meetings law of Louisiana states that any public body meetings and documents must be made available for public observation and participation except in cases specifically established by law. In addition, notice to these meetings must be posted at least 24 hours in advance outside the meeting place and on the body’s website if it has one.

The Student Senate, the legislative arm of SG, doesn’t do this; leaders cite difficulties out of their control in posting to the website and point to other ways to stay current with SG.

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A provision of SG’s code acknowledges its requirement to comply with the open meetings law, as does a University Courts advisory opinion in 2022 that set ground rules for following the statute. Additionally, in 1994, the state attorney general opined that LSU’s SG is a public body under the law. 

“Having a functional democracy requires interaction between leaders and citizens. That cannot happen if citizens are left out of public meetings,” said Steven Procopio, president of the Public Affairs Research Council, a nonpartisan nonprofit focusing on state government, commenting generally on the role of the open meetings law.

Earlier this month, the SG website added a link to a Google Drive folder that contains legislation passed and proposed by the Senate, as well as veto letters from the student body president. From this folder, members of the public can click to the “Senate Drive Fall 2023,” which houses other information, including meeting agendas under the “General Body Meeting Resources” folder. 

Student Senate Speaker Emma Bruney and Student Body President Anna Catherine Strong pointed to their newsletter as the way to track what will be discussed in advance of weekly meetings. (The executive branch has a newsletter, as well.)

Though members of the public can subscribe to the Senate newsletter on the SG website, this does not satisfy the requirement of the open meetings law that agendas be posted 24 hours in advance on the body’s website or outside its meeting place. Nor does the drive link to the legislation folder, though this provides greater access to SG material than was previously available.

The reason for SG having a subscription-based information delivery is because posting on its website isn’t as easy as it should be, Bruney said.

To upload anything on an LSU website, you first need to get proper certification by LSU. Then the addition has to be approved by the university administration, and for the legislative branch, that took nearly a month to get done, Bruney said.

While getting meeting agendas to the public in compliance with State Statute is still a work in progress, the Senate has made moves to make other information more easily accessible, such as with the Google Drive.

Last semester, SG’s online filing system left students with only their best guesses on what past, present and future legislation had been or would be decided on at meetings. There wasn’t an up-to-date filing system with past decisions and records.

To help change that, Bruney said, she spent part of her summer moving records, including legislation passed by SG and veto documents, into the Google Drive folder so that decisions are easier to find.

“We change speaker every year, so one speaker can be really on top of it, one not so much,” Bruney said. “We can have a whole year of missing records on the digital commons.”

Bruney and her colleagues are still working to file years of hard documents into their online platform, the LSU online scholarly repository, which currently has little to no substantial information on SG. 

To work around some of their built-in struggles, Strong said, they’re moving to Instagram so the younger generation can comprehensively access executive branch updates outside of their staff meetings.

“Something we’re trying to do is keep everything on social media. Student Government has been able to get ahead on this, but not every part of the university has,” Strong said.  

The posts are primarily promotional material or event updates, but the link in the account bio provides an executive initiative tracker. This describes details of events put on by the executive branch, including the date, whether funding is needed and sometimes notes with updates. SG also posts weekly updates about what happened at its general body meetings.

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Although SG represents the student body, many students are unfamiliar with what powers do – and don’t – lie in SG’s hands. 

For instance, if the Senate makes a decision pertaining to the structure of the university, it still needs the help of a relevant department or the Faculty Senate, which is a representative body of professors. If said department finds issues with funding, agreements or anything else, the action is out of SG’s hands.

“All we can do is spend money from the student initiatives fees – technically we can put a bouncy house in the Quad and the administration can’t do anything about it,” Bruney said. “Other things that are more structural, we are just voicing the opinions of students to faculty.”

Each student paid $2.20 this semester in SG fees to fund the initiatives that are voted on by the elected student senators at these meetings. That may not seem like a lot, but with over 30,000 students enrolled, two semesters equals upward of $130,000, according to the SG budget. That money is combined with surplus funds from previous years.

Those dollars are spent in a few ways. A $16,000 chunk pays the salaries of six SG leaders. A bigger portion — $146,000 — was given to students or student organizations in the past year, according to the SG website. 

Although LSU coordinator Cortney Greavis, a university employee who is paid a little over $23,000 by this fund, keeps student senators from writing whatever checks they want, the initial spending decision lies with SG. The budget is already available in the Google Drive under the “Final Legislation” folder, but SG is still working on making available a budgetary dashboard that explains what this money is spent on rather than just how much is spent. 

SG also proposes raises and cuts on student recommended fees like SG, mass transit and student media, but these require approval from the LSU Board of Supervisors before being finalized.

Ultimately, student senators control tens of thousands of dollars of their classmates’ money. The Senate’s meetings are the public forums where those decisions and debates happen; compliance with the law ensures students are afforded the chance to weigh in on these issues.

“My number one thing, I think the number one thing for all of us, is transparency,” Bruney said. “We want to be efficient, effective, and transparent. The website makes it hard, but we’re trying.”

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Clarification: A paragraph was updated to clarify that it was referring to the Senate newsletter, and to add information about the executive newsletter.