Members of IU Student Association Congress passed four resolutions and approved IUSA’s budget at their assembly meeting Tuesday night in Hodge Hall.
The agenda for the meeting showed five resolutions for consideration, but a resolution proposing an amendment to the bylaws regarding executive stipends was tabled for reconsideration.
Congressman Andrew Guenther, representing off-campus residency, wrote the tabled resolution. The resolution proposed a change to the IUSA bylaws that would set executive stipends at 12 percent of the operational IUSA budget. An executive stipend is a payment made directly to the bursar account of an executive member, such as the president or treasurer.
It also proposed a change that would stop the use of IUSA funds for benefits, such as parking passes, for IUSA executives.
Of the IUSA operational budget of $66,000, $15,000 was allocated for executive stipends. That constitutes almost 23 percent of the IUSA operational budget for the year.
“This means that executive stipends and the parking passes totaled around 30% of the total IUSA budget, which I thought sounded a bit extreme,” Guenther said.
The stipend of $3000 for each of the five executives follows precedent set by previous years’ stipends.
However, this amount was allocated and distributed with a planned budget of $100,000. The stipends were distributed before the budget was approved by IUSA Congress and before the final allocation of $60,000 was known to Treasurer Wes Cuprill.
Cuprill said the stipends were distributed so early because of logistics with the Bursar accounts.
He said IUSA was notified that its actual allocated budget would be $60,000 well into the school year, after the stipends were already distributed. An additioanl $6000 was taken from reserve funds to meet IUSA’s budgeted need of $66,000.
“None of this was done in malicious intent by any means,” Cuprill said. “I was acting purely on precedent and the fact that all of our time frames had been messed up because of all of the ambiguity of the election cycle last year.”
Another resolution passed at the meeting calls for staplers to be placed at printing stations across campus. The resolution’s primary author, Craig Douglas, said he decided to write the bill after a post on Yik Yak last year suggesting staplers at printers received support from more than 400 users.
“To me, that seemed like democracy,” Douglas said. “The people spoke in a very public, anonymous forum. I was like, ‘Hey, I can do something about this,’ and then I did something about it.”
The other three resolutions passed during the meeting dealt with the judicial branch of IUSA.
One passed resolution appointed Owen Hoepfner chief justice of the IUSA Supreme Court and also appointed associate justices.
Another resolution appointed Adam Kehoe president of the election commission. Kehoe was a member of the election commission last year.
Another resolution amended the election code to have 10 election commissioners, with one serving as a non-voting chair of the commission. Previously, there were nine commissioners, as one served both as the chair and a voting member. The resolution is intended to spread the work load of the commission and stop commissioners from voting to please the chair.
“The previous commissioners talked, and we felt sometimes the vote of the chair held more weight and other commissioners would vote to please the chair,” Kehoe said. “We felt that this — taking the chair out of the voting process ... would more accurately represent the student population.”
