House passes First Year Experience Resolution

There was another full room for Wednesday night’s ASOSU House of Representative’s meeting. Ten to 15 students filled the back rows of the meeting room waiting to hear ASOSU’s vote on the “Resolution for Student Involvement in First Year Experience.”

The audience did have to wait for long. After discussion regarding the resolution by the House, and last night’s passing of the legislation by the Senate, the audience went home happy.

The resolution was slightly revised due to grammatical changes and one “whereas” stricken from the record. Being a justification and not an action, the House and Senate are allowed to pass the same pieces of legislation with different justifications.

The removed line said “whereas: there is no mention to incoming student of the change.” As this is not true, graduate Representative Matthew Palm placed a motion that this be stricken from the resolution. The motion unanimously passed.

Multiple representatives stressed the importance of passing this piece of legislation because of the constant tablings which have occurred in the past weeks.

“I have been contacted by several students who want us to act and act now,” Representative John Aljets said. “[So] we need to act as quickly as possible.”

The resolution passed by an overwhelming majority, 15-1, Palm was the only “no” vote on the resolution.

According to Palm, at some point OSU needs to adopt the First Year Experience Plan. He cited that 60 percent of OSU students are graduating in six years and retention is a problem at OSU.

Two other pieces of legislation were brought to the House. One for its second reading and vote, and another for its first reading and vote, but standing rules were forgone in order to have a vote happen last night.

The first was the “Membership Clarification Act” for its second reading. The act will be changing who is considered an “elector” by the ASOSU constitution and contains a clarification of membership.

If passed, ASOSU members would be selected from the Corvallis campus exclusively.

The main point within the debate was around excluding major campus entities such as the Cascade Campus from the ability to participate in the election process. Representative Nick Rosoff made the motion that the resolution be postponed with the mandate that conversations be held with the Cascade Campus. This motion was passed and will be heard after the next week’s joint session.

The second piece of legislation was the “Bill to Support OSU in Signing the Federal Tuition Assistance Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Defense.” The bill regards the funding of students who are currently in the military and are funded by the Department of Defense.

This was the first reading and standing rules were suspended by a two-thirds vote to pass the legislation that evening.

If OSU does not sign the Memorandum of Understanding, then the Department of Defense will not supply the university with funds to assist students in the military.

The university has until March 1, 2013 to sign the MOU, and the bill requests that the administration get this done before the deadline.

The Chairman of the Student and Incidental Fees Committee, Brad Alvarez, opened up the meeting with an overview of the history, structure and operations of the SIFC. The presentation was to make representatives aware of the SIFC decision-making process before the budget presentation next week.

The budget will be presented to SIFC next Wednesday, Feb. 20, from 7 to 9 p.m. in the MU lounge. Both the House and the Senate will vote on the proposed funding for multiple student organizations. If passed, the budgets will be passed onto President Ray for approval.

Ricky Zipp, news reporter
news@dailybarometer.com