Rules & Regs Meeting Keynotes

Few things talked about in R&R meeting today you may find interesting.

1. Extended campaigning two weeks before spring break. Don't get too upset about this, basically it is "soft campaigning" and only the candidate would be allowed to go out and campaign. The benefits of this in my opinion are huge. It will force candidates to talk about actual issues. It seems we only have one SBP candidate a year actually talk about real issues. For the last four years they have been Jake Bathman, Will Hailey, Scott Smith, and Mark McCaig respectively. This will also give lesser known and smaller budget candidates to have a shot instead of the most popular and most funded candidates. Also, allowing early campaigning will allow candidates to talk longer with different student groups instead of forcing them to cut their talks down to two or three minutes. I will go more into the election regulations in more detail once I get a more final draft back from Jake. The election people are being great about talking with the R&R meeting and I would like to extend my thanks to Jake for this.

2. Facebook will be allowed in campaigning with almost no restrictions. This is a huge step in the right direction of SGA getting out of the students' business and worrying about real issues. This and the Senate Ticket regulations last year were blatant violations of the SGA constitution and even worse violations of the basic concepts of representative democracy. The Ticket regulation was ruled by the J-Court under Chris Cook to be unconstitutional and I am confident that the Facebook regulation would be ruled to be the same.

3. There will not be any University Apartment Senate Seats this time around. Conner talked about getting Senate Seats for the University Apartments seeing as they are now represented by off campus but are still under the regulation of RHA. This is a good idea but the R&R Comm cannot find a good way of putting this in. We would have to give two seats for University Apartments (650 students) and actually grant what would become almost over-representation. The best way to address the issue that we came up with was to move the University Apartments from off campus to north side. This evens out residency between north and south side and provides better representation. One idea that was brought up in the R&R meeting was to create a "Special Residency Caucus" to allow for one seat to be University Apartments and another to be in house Greek residency. The R&R people did not go for this and so it will not be in the final draft of the bill.

These are my general observations, many of these are just in talks right now but seem pretty solid on what is going to be happening.