The Student Government Senate held its second weekly meeting Wednesday night and debated amending a bill to regulate senators’ required office hours.SG Bill No. 1, which requires senators to submit office hours to the Senate to be posted on the SG Web site, was passed after almost half an hour of debate.
“Right now, there is no real way of knowing where senators are or if they are going to be where they are supposed to be,” said Ben Clark, SG Speaker of the Senate.
According to Speaker Pro-Tempore Drew Prestridge, the bill was designed to instill a greater sense of accountability from senators for students. Enforcing mandatory office hours has been a difficulty for the Senate over the past year.In the past, SG senators have been required to be available for at least one hour a week for students to present them with questions. SGB No. 1 does not change the amount of time senators must be present in their office, but does require them to set permanent time slots of availability.”To be quite frank, this is a duty of senators that has been sometimes neglected  in the past,” said Sen. Greg Upton, College of Business who authored the bill. “This is going to make sure we fulfill those duties.”Though the content of the bill was generally approved of by the Senate, several amendments to the bill were debated concerning the wording of the bill.Because a part of the bill was unclear about the amount of time senators had to submit their scheduled office hours, time was taken to restructure several of its sentences and its third paragraph was completely removed. Once the amendments had been agreed on, another vote was taken and the bill was passed unanimously.
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Contact Adam Duvernay at [email protected]