We began this semester by challenging Student Government to put its money where its mouth is. Each year, SG’s newest president promises this will be the year student interests reign supreme. So we called their bluff and suggested SG pledge $5,000 to a student-proposed initiative. This idea was instituted by Yale’s College Council in 2008 to general student acclaim and struck us as a concrete way for our University’s SG to put the student back in student government.And tonight the SG Student Senate can vote to create just such an initiative on campus.Speaker Pro-Tempore and Arts and Sciences Sen. Drew Prestridge, Business Sen. Greg Upton and UCFY Sen. Chris Sellers authored SGR No. 6, a resolution to create the Temporary Student Initiative Committee. The committee, if created, will collect University student proposals to be funded by next year’s SG.”This is just to form a committee that will oversee the process of this $5,000 allocation,” Prestridge said.The committee, if created, will establish exactly who in SG will be in charge of gathering the ideas from students and narrowing down all of the ideas to a list. Prestridge noted the committee would select which student ideas will make it on the ballot.”The committee will narrow them down to a certain number,” Prestridge said, “and they’ll cut it down to three or five to put on the ballot. We want to have the really legitimate ones on the ballot.”This strikes us as sensible. With the right publicity, an initiative like this can attract so many proposals there would be no feasible way to put all of them on the ballot this spring — nor would any one idea easily gain a plurality of votes if each idea submitted actually makes it on the ballot. We believe students should have more of a say on how fees are spent than the semestrial election of representatives — and student leaders should want the same thing. It’s easy to cast a ballot once a semester for whomever has the coolest name or prettiest pushcard. It’s much harder to actually take responsibility for the SG we elect. This resolution, if passed, gives every University student a stake in what SG does — and it gives us a chance to do more than just cast a vote and then tune out until another unwanted pushcard is thrust into our hands this spring.We commend Prestridge, Upton and Sellers for authoring this legislation and urge the Senate to pass the resolution. —-Contact the Editorial Board at [email protected]