By Julia Ross-McGuire | October 10, 2022
Photo Credit: Shutterstock
Senate committees were unanimously approved by the Student Association's legislative body at last Wednesday’s meeting, allowing for the distribution of supplemental funding.
All five senate committees along with two subcommittees were approved in a single piece of legislation sponsored by Senate Chair Naishaly Velez Galan.
UAlbany’s Student Association is composed of three branches: the executive, legislative, and judicial. The Senate is the legislative body and meets weekly to review legislation and hear reports from the executive branch. The Senate is entirely composed of elected students with elections being held two times a year: the Fall general, and the Spring general. Additional elections are held as needed to fill vacancies.
As they have now appointed a vice chair, Jalen Miller, the body was enabled to pass committee appointments.
The body has five committees: Committee on Community Engagement and Outreach, Committee on Constituent Relations, Committee on Appropriations, Committee on Rules, and Committee on Ethics. It also contains two subcommittees: the Subcommittee on First Year Engagement, a part of the Committee on Constituent Relations, and Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Operations, a part of the Committee on Rules. These committees help to ensure the senate’s functionality both internally and externally with bylaw 204.1 stating the role of each committee.
The Appropriations Committee, Committee on Constituent Relations, and Committee on Community Engagement and Outreach help to get funding to student groups, interact with students, and build a relationship between the student body and Albany community, respectively. The Committee on Rules and Committee on Ethics both deal with the internal function of the Student Association through ensuring members of the Student Association don’t break any guidelines, and by resolving any issues regarding bylaws.
The two subcommittees help to handle more specific matters within the larger scope of the committees, with chairs on either committee being ranking members of the committee their subcommittee falls under.
Similar to the Chair of the Senate overseeing the meeting of the Senate, the chairs of each committee and subcommittee oversee their committee’s meetings. Ranking members help to lead meetings as needed and provide other administrative assistance to the chair, not unlike the role of vice chair within the senate.
The meeting also saw the senate unanimously appoint Jason Lisciandro, Ethan Warren, and Ciarra Medrano to the Dippikill Board of Directors. Dippikill “is a private 1000-acre wilderness retreat facility owned by the Student Association of the University at Albany,” according to the Discover Dippikill website. The directors help to make decisions for its operations and maintenance.