Senate meeting scrapped

SFC Chair Nick Rowe presents proposed student-fee allocations to the senate on Feb. 20. Photo by Miles Sanguinetti.

Portland State’s already contentious budget process became more complicated Friday after the PSU student government judicial board invalidated Wednesday’s Associated Students of Portland State University student senate meeting.

At the meeting, next year’s budget for student fee-funded areas was debated and approved, but, at the Judicial Board’s request, the meeting will have to be held again on Wednesday.

The judicial board ruled that the meeting did not comply with Oregon’s Public Meeting Law guidelines for public notification.

“What I can tell you was that it was a clear violation,” said Judicial Board Chief Justice Aubrey Hoffman. “Our student government needs to be as clear as possible.”

The ruling stated that notice was made through a bulletin board and a private email list, and that the agenda omitted key details about the meeting.

“The reasoning behind this decision was that we did not feel that the public had adequate notice about the meeting, and that the budget was a big enough issue that it needed to be explicitly stated,” the ruling said.

“Clearly, the law requires that meetings be posted to all interested parties at least 24 hours in advance, with a summary of what’s up for discussion,” said Judson Randall, president and co-founder of Open Oregon, an organization that teaches Oregonians their rights under the Oregon Public Meetings and Records laws. Randall is also the Student Publications adviser at PSU. “The [judicial] board is, in my take, correct: It
was invalid.”

PSU’s student government has faced many challenging issues over the last several weeks, with the senate, student fee committee and judicial board at odds over key decisions, including the budget, oversight and student leaders’ compensation.

“Personally, I want things to work the way they should,” Hoffman said.

The ruling means the senate will have to vote again on the budget at the scheduled March 13 meeting, a topic that entailed nearly four hours of heated debate at the March 6 meeting, much of which related to an attempt by members of the publications department to avert precipitous budget cuts.

At the SFC’s Monday meeting, two members disputed the Judicial Board’s authority.

Voting senate members may vote differently at the “do-over” meeting.

The senate voted to reject the SFC’s budget, recommending that they give publications the increase they asked for, which is still a cut of nearly $70,000 from the current year’s budget.

The SFC convened a meeting-within-a-meeting, making the recommended changes before the budget was ultimately approved despite the efforts of several senators to make changes that would prevent wage decreases for senators and more than 100 other student leaders.

Despite the objections, ASPSU President Tiffany Dollar said she was happy with the budget that was passed at the invalid meeting, including the pay cuts for student leaders that would take effect next year.

“I feel like student government was being paid way more than student leaders in other groups,” Dollar said. “This is more fair—that was the goal.”

SFC Chair Nick Rowe, who leads the group overseeing the roughly $14 million brought in annually by the $216 per 12 credit hours students pay each quarter, called the budget “certainly a compromise,” adding that he was not pleased with some of the dialog at the meeting.

“It’s always an adventure with the senate,” Rowe said, maintaining that since the original budget had been presented to the senate two weeks earlier, the senators had no reason to be surprised by the cuts, or assume that large changes could be made this late in the process without increasing the student fee. “With all due respect, we’ve been working on this budget for five months.”

The SFC budget must be presented to PSU President Wim Wiewel for approval by Monday, March 18, and the senate will likely vote on it again at the regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday, March 13.

“It has accelerated the process much more quickly than I would have liked,” Rowe said of the judicial board’s ruling, though he maintained that a similar result regarding the revised budget would likely be achieved.

“It won’t increase the fee: I don’t think the president will have a problem with it.”