Report to the Board of Trustees
November 1st, 2007 Chancellor’s Board Room
Justin Ritchie Student Body President UNC Charlotte
- Association of Student Governments
- Scaled back current participation in the UNC Association of Student
Governments due to problems with organization by sending only the
Student Body President to the meetings instead of the usual 4 member
delegation - ASG responsible for providing student on Board of
Governors and responsible for UNC system level student government
coordination- A Student Body President cannot serve on Board of Governors because
he/she serves on Board of Trustees and can not serve on two boards at
once - Every student pays $1 per year to provide the organization’s budget
- A Student Body President cannot serve on Board of Governors because
- Problems include:
- Ineffectiveness, i.e. no results over past few years
- Large ($200k) budget yields distractions
- Acts as little more than a sounding board for Student Gov’t Association egos
- How can organization be improved?
- Good leadership, I think ASG has that now that the organization
president resigned a little under a month ago, his personal problems
were destroying the organization, I’ll find out more about the new ASG
leadership when I’m at the Nov. meeting in Raleigh this weekend - We can also improve the organization by reducing the budget,
fee is up for review this year at Board of Governors, we are advocating
for it to be cut - Finally we can improve the organization by focusing on
getting students registered to vote, getting students out to vote,
getting early voting stations on every campus, and compiling numbers
that prove students vote, this will act as leverage for organization
goals
- Good leadership, I think ASG has that now that the organization
- Scaled back current participation in the UNC Association of Student
- Campus Safety Report
- We compiled campus safety statistics from the FBI’s Clery Act
Campus Crime database and contrasted the information for our campus
with the campuses identified by the board of governors as “peer
institutions” we then also identified institutions that are in similar
metro areas and compared our crime statistics with those campuses - We are working with Marlene Hall on putting forward some
recommendations to address some target areas that the report
identified, specifically auto theft - We’ll also be updating the report between the Fall and
Spring semesters to include last years newly available crime numbers
from every campus. - A major concern that was noticed during the study is a
failure of the federal and state governments to provide clear and
precise rules for crime reporting for every campus, we are exploring
methods to advocate for changes in those policies.
- We compiled campus safety statistics from the FBI’s Clery Act
- Transit Tax Debate
- We held the SGA Transit Tax Debate in the Harris Alumni Center last
Tuesday to address the Transit Tax Repeal issue in Meck. County. - SGA partnered with the College Democrats, College
Republicans and Non-Partisan Political Action group on campus to hold
debate to hold this non-partisan issue centric debate. - This debate was the first part of our long term plan to turn
UNC Charlotte into a local political force, the next step is
establishing a student lobby corps which we hope to have in place by
early next semester. - At the debate Jennifer Roberts presented reasons to vote
against the repeal of the transit tax while Keith Larson represented
the reasons to vote for repeal - Well over 200 turned out, about 3/4 of those were students with standing room only for much of the audience
- After talking to many students, most of them were interested
in getting a light rail station on campus and thus opposed the transit
tax repeal - With voter turnout at the university city library last year
barely breaking double digits, to get a group of students highly
energized about a local political issue has been outstanding and will
likely result in great early voting numbers. - And a big thanks to Chip Rossi our new Alumni Affairs
Director for helping us immensly by letting us hold the
debate in the Harris Alumni Center and by staying throughout the debate
to ensure everything was running smoothly.
- We held the SGA Transit Tax Debate in the Harris Alumni Center last
- SGA Voter Shuttle
- To make early voting even easier, we provided a shuttle from campus
to the university city library polling location during a few peak hours
on Tuesday of this week so that students could take advantage of the
new same day voter registration options. We partnered with Chip Rossi
and Ashley Oster to provide this service. - Our goal for next semester is to provide an early voting location in the Atkins Library on campus in all future elections.
- Green Fee Proposal
-
- And switching gears from city elections into SGA elections, A
little under 2000 students voted in our fall elections and 71.7% of
those students answered that they were in favor of a $2.50 fee per
semester to enact environmentally sustainable initatives on campus - Since those results were compiled, I have been working with
my executive cabinet on establishing the framework for how that money
will be distributed. We have developed a unique opportunity to manage
the money provided by the potential fee with a student governed
committee that partners with facilities to allow students to submit
ideas for sustainable projects that would then be enacted by these
students. We have submitted the final proposal to Dr. Dubois and Dr.
Jackson for their review.
- And switching gears from city elections into SGA elections, A
- Sustainable Efforts on Campus
- In partnering with campus recycling we held the first annual campus
sustainability day which included a very successful campus clean up,
around 150 groups participated - Campus sustainability day also included a presentation from
Nexxus lighting which is an LED lighting firm. We are in the process of
gathering information from facilities on the current cost of lighting
parking decks on campus and we’ll put together a proposal on how much
the up-front cost of replacing a few target parking decks with LED
lights along with the long term savings - To pull all our environmentlally sustainable initiatives
together, we are working on a campus wide sustainability policy which
will include details on establishing local foods on campus and water
conservation ideas
- In partnering with campus recycling we held the first annual campus
- Tailgating
- Finally: We’ve got pre-game men’s basketball tailgating at the old
Brocker Health Center lot! SGA is excited about the opportunity that
this will provide to our most dedicated fans. Tailgating will start 2
hours before weekend men’s basketball games and our first tailgate will
be before the Nov. 9th season opener vs. High Point
- Finally: We’ve got pre-game men’s basketball tailgating at the old
