At the end of the LUCC meeting on Thursday Chris Worman officially handed the gavel and the presidency of LUCC to Cole Delaney. In a very brief acceptance speech, Delaney spoke about his immediate goal of adapting an online voting system to replace the old paper ballet system currently used for LUCC elections. During the meeting several of Delaney’s proposed constitutional and bylaw changes were both discussed and voted upon. The first bylaw change that was discussed was entitled Electronic Transcript.
The proposed change called for LUCC meetings to be recorded and for those recording to be made available to Lawrence students as well as maintained in the Lawrence University archives.
After little discussion the bylaw change was amended and approved under the wording that only LUCC general council meetings were included in the change, however, other committee meetings were also encouraged to record their meetings.
This change will allow for more Lawrence students who are not able to attend the meetings to have knowledge of the activities taking place at LUCC meetings.
The second by-law change, entitled Rules of Order Changes, was proposed with the intent of changing the current methods of voting that apply to all LUCC voting members. Currently all LUCC voting members are allowed three types of votes, to vote to approve a proposal, to reject a proposed, or to abstain from the vote.
Members of LUCC are encouraged to abstain if they have a personal conflict of interest with the proposal or if for some other reason they feel they cannot render a fair judgment. Under article II of the original proposal, “no student member may abstain from voting on main motions unless such a motion has a direct personal or pecuniary interest not common to other members of the council.
Some members of LUCC are having increasing concern for other representatives who abstain from a vote on important issues. Because the recording secretary for LUCC does not record how each member voted, students have no way of knowing how there representatives voted. The idea behind eliminating abstentions is to force LUCC members to both make a decisions about the pressing issues before the council and to be held accountable for their decisions. The abstention allows for a voting member not to vote and in essence not take a stand on a topic.
The proposed change would have allowed members to abstain only for person conflicts and would have created more strict laws about abstaining from a vote.
The second clause of the by-law change was amended out of the Rules of Order Change, however, the first and third clause of the bylaw change were approved.
The approved bylaw change now allows for any member of LUCC to
order a “roll call vote on main motions present before the council.” This will allow students to view how their representative voted.
The third clause of the original bylaw change which was also approved now allows for the president to call for up to a five minute recess to allow members of LUCC to collect their thoughts before a vote. Two recesses are allowed to be called per meeting to prevent abuse of this power.
The final by-law changed proposed by Delaney will call for all group recognition to be dealt with by the Committee on Committees instead of by the General Council. According to the proposal the LUCC General
Council spends a large amount of time voting on group recognition, which is a task that could be easily managed by a sub-committee. Since the Committee on Committees is rarely used it would not be a huge burden for them to hear the motions for group recognition. This change would also make it easier for students who have to sit through lengthy LUCC General Council meetings in order to have their group approved.
This by-law change was tabled so that the wording of the change could be discussed before moving to vote on the proposal.
President Delaney also announced his cabinet selections for his term in office. Aubra Hoffman will be the new Parliamentarian, Tariq Engineer was selected for Treasurer, Sarah Burke will take over the role of Recording Secretary, Steven Tie Shue assumes the role of Corresponding Secretary and, Justin Eckl will be the next Finance Secretary.
The student welfare committee made several announcements about changes that will be occurring around the Lawrence campus. New emergency phones will be installed behind Science Hall and by the rec. center. Lighting on Campus will be made more efficient.
The weight room of the rec. center will be finished with newer equipment and a proposal is being made to allocate a certain amount of funding per year for the upkeep of the weight room.
Finally, a virus protection program is available to all Lawrence students because of increasing problems with viruses over the Lawrence network.