ASUI Senate to vote on eliminating multiple positions
If the bills proposed by ASUI President Nate Fisher at last week’s meeting pass through Senate on Wednesday, it would mean the end of multiple ASUI positions that Fisher said have become unnecessary to the operations of ASUI.
The four proposed bills, if passed, would eliminate the director of sustainability and community relations coordinator positions, as well as abolish the ASUI Recreation Board and most of the Idaho Commons and Union Board (ICUB).
Nate Fisher
“With all of these, we found that these positions and some of these boards were a little bit unnecessary and they’re often filling services that already exist,” Fisher said. “It seems to me that ASUI positions can create some redundancy that inhibits efficiency within government.”
Fisher said the director of sustainability’s job is to work in conjunction with the University of Idaho Sustainability Center as a student liaison between ASUI and the Sustainability Center, and to help with programming.
Fisher said the Sustainability Center is good about putting on events without need or assistance from ASUI, and he said the center has its own student coordinators who put on a lot of the programming. The Sustainability Center gets funds from the student activity fund and the ASUI director of sustainability is paid, so Fisher said they are paying twice as much as needed for sustainability projects.
“We all value and understand the importance of sustainability and making sure that we are always striving to be a green university and one that is sustainable, but this position probably isn’t the best way to go about doing that,” Fisher said.
Another bill would eliminate the ASUI community relations coordinator position.
“They attend a lot of meetings,” Fisher said. “They are our liaison between students and the community. That position hasn’t been very well developed in recent years.”
He said the coordinator is asked to go to city council meetings and other important events happening around the city, but the position has been underutilized and is unnecessary. The ASUI Communications Board is already made up of five or six members, so the roles of the community relations coordinator could be absorbed by other board members, he said.
Another bill would eliminate the ASUI Recreation Board made up of two members — a chair and a vice-chair. Fisher said the two are responsible for working in conjunction with Campus Recreation and some of the larger programming events, such as the Spirit Sprint in the fall and the Vandal Fitness Challenge each spring.
“We are not necessarily getting rid of the programs themselves,” Fisher said. “The board — its scope and its vision — wasn’t necessarily broad enough for us to be hiring on two additional people and for this board to really continue to exist.”
He said what would happen with the two position’s previous roles is at the discretion of Max Cowan and Stetson Holman with next year’s ASUI administration, but Fisher said it is his understanding that the plan is to delegate the responsibilities of the Recreation Board to the ASUI director of athletics and the ASUI director of health and wellness.
Another bill would serve to eliminate the Idaho Commons and Union Board, although Fisher said the board would just be cut from three people to one because there is not enough duties for the board members to justify having three members. He said the duties of the board are to work on building and development projects and to make sure the Idaho Commons and the Bruce Pitman Center are satisfying student interests and needs.
“The chairperson this year mentioned to us that she felt it was almost more work to think of tasks to delegate to the rest of the board than it was to actually accomplish the work that she needed to do,” Fisher said.
The ASUI Senate will discuss and vote on each bill Wednesday. Each position up for elimination is a paid, one-year position, Fisher said. He said eliminating the positions would make student government more efficient and would also save ASUI approximately $7,650 in a fiscal year.
“We want to operate a lean government but still be able to provide students the opportunity to get involved and be leaders, but when that starts to interfere with some efficiency, we have some issues,” he said.
Mary Malone can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @InkSlasherEdit