GSSC is joining the group

At their Tuesday night general body meeting, the General Studies Student Council debated ABC’s proposal to turn the Bacchanal Committee into a group under the auspices of the VPs of Finance from the four undergraduate student councils, the same proposal that was debated last week at CCSC. GSSC President Peter Nason said that the proposal made the Bacchanal a “de-facto seventh line-item” in governing board allocations. Neither ESC nor SGA voted on this proposal this week.

Nason justified the proposal by saying that the Bacchanal Committee had been a “headache” before, so it was right to reform it. He also suggested that if the proposal didn’t work next year, the Bacchanal Committee could be run completely under the student councils, like Glass House Rocks.

The council approved the proposal with three changes. First, the Bacchanal Committee has to get 3/4ths approval of the four VPs (CCSC made the same revision). Second, the VPs of Finance have 48 hours to approve expenditure requests or significant changes by the Bacchanal Committee (CCSC voted for a 24 hour limit, and Nason suggested this discrepancy could be worked out at a later date).

The third alteration was to make it explicit in the proposal that the Bacchanal Committee had to get approval for decisions on “revenue sources and ticketing.” The council debated this change for a while, with Usenator Katherine Sotano arguing that language that was too broad in the proposal could cause the Bacchanal Committee to make ticketing changes that would hurt GSSC, and Nason arguing that changing the proposal too much could make ABC or the Bacchanal Committee to pull out. However, most of this argument dealt with adding a possible fifth bullet point on the list of the Bacchanal Committee’s duties, and an alteration instead of the first bullet point seemed to satisfy both council members.

The proposal will be negotiated further among the four councils, although they want to have a finished proposal before F@CU (the end-of-year allocations to the six governing boards).

Updates:

• GS won money for its student council because of its high participation in the Quality of Life Survey. If GSSC can get the money this semester, they are considering using it to fund snack attacks and using the money saved on snack attacks to fund a Shabbat dinner in the GS lounge.
• Sotano’s initiative to improve the Dodge Gym is trying to get functional fitness equipment (a type of fitness equipment, not merely ones that work).
• VP of Policy Elizabeth Heyman is making a survey to find out when it is best to have shuttles to JFK during finals.