Student Government held their weekly senate meeting Wednesday night in the International room in the Union, with the majority of the meeting dedicated to appointing students to various committees and positions.
One position pushed to a vote tonight was to appoint Alex English to the Programming, Support and Initiatives fund committee. The committee is comprised of SG members, administration and other non-SG students that oversee funds which student organizations can apply to for on-campus events.
Speaker of the Student Senate Alexandra de Gravelle said the resolution was moved forward to ensure all positions on the board were filled prior to the committee meeting tomorrow.
Another resolution passed to move to the Campus Affairs and Sustainability committee, SGR No. 4, is to request both LSU Facility Services and The Lemoine Company avoid working on louder projects on both Patrick F. Taylor Hall and the BEC. De Gravelle said noise on the projects has been distracting to students during lectures and testing.
“There’s a lot of drilling and pounding going on,” de Gravelle said. “So student wrote a resolution to consider decreasing the amount of power tool usage during peak hours of class.”
Two other pieces of legislation brought up and passed to committee concern the University’s graduate program. One of the two, SGR No. 5, is a resolution to the administration to improve graduate student stipends in effort to reduce graduate student debt and increase the University’s competitiveness in graduate student recruitment.
De Gravelle said the Senate will be in close talks with the administration throughout the year on how to improve the University’s graduate program. She also added that the graduate program affects SG funding through students applying for additional funding.
“Graduate students apply for funding through the graduate college, and are only awarded a certain amount of money,” de Gravelle said. “And when they aren’t awarded as much money as they need, they apply to senate funding.”
One of the last items on the agenda for the meeting was SGR No.1, to approve the University’s SG budget for 2016-2017. Sen. Badeaux took the time to go through certain sections of the budget, which for the most part remains unchanged.