Associated Students, Inc. amends payment bylaw for officers and directors

Associated Students, Inc. senators and executives will no longer be paid monthly and bi-monthly and instead be paid once at the beginning of the semester by scholarship, leaving some worried about how student leaders will be kept accountable for doing their work.

While elected executives will see the new scholarship payment system in the second phase of changes in June 2017, when the new government structure will also be enacted, the change will affect senators beginning in June of this year.

Despite earlier concerns over accountability expressed by Vice President Miriam Hernandez and Treasurer Wendy Lewis last fall, the senate passed the Payment Bylaw Amendment at their last meeting April 27.

“What I decided personally was: I was elected to do a job based on what the student body wanted,” Hernandez said. “I did whatever the Board of Control Ad Hoc committee wanted. And the Ad Hoc committee was composed of financial aid, student groups, senate representatives [and] various people from the university, and as a collective board, they made a decision to advise that ASI Senate support [the change].”

How it all began

The issue was brought up after it was revealed that the current president, Jose Salazar, was unable to get paid because he is undocumented and did not have his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals paperwork filed. Salazar brought a proposal for revisions to the executive pay policy to the Board of Control.

The Ad Hoc committee was appointed by Lewis and the board when the original revisions could not be agreed upon in BOC meetings last fall.

The scholarships for each position will be paid out at the beginning of each semester, before the student has performed the duties of the position. According to Richard Haller, executive director of ASI, how the student government will keep the student officials accountable has yet to be addressed.

ASI bylaw 2.1.2.D-3 states: “To receive compensation, all office hours must be completed and recorded with the Assistant Director of Student Involvement and Leadership and/or the ASI Department Secretary.” The bylaws do not elaborate on what happens if a student does not complete their hours.

When giving a scholarship, ASI can’t make it contingent on future actions because a student is supposed to get it based on eligibility, Haller said. If a student stops holding required office hours or attending required meetings, there isn’t an immediate course of action to hold that student accountable.

“I’m not a big fan,” Haller said. “And even in our current system, right now they’re given a monthly director’s fee, and we don’t have a process in place where we withhold that if they miss meetings. It’s just not written down anywhere where we can do that … We have to think of some way of holding them accountable. But right now, the only way of doing that is subjecting them to recall [election], and maybe that is the only way.”

The bylaws currently state the if a petition with 15 percent of enrolled students’ signatures or three-fourths of the senate is presented to the ASI president, any elected officer will be subject to recall.

Haller pointed out that it is also not defined what a senator or officer has to do to be subject to recall. Haller said that by letting students who put the person in office decide if they get to stay is the way to “put it back into the hands of students.”

Because it would be a scholarship, ASI also can no longer require that an executive not hold another job.

Financial aid concerns

Because the payment is now technically a scholarship, it would fall under financial aid and may interfere with a student’s other potential financial aid eligibility. In the April 20 meeting, the senate amended the resolution to “encourage students to talk with a financial aid counselor” before running for office, according to the meeting minutes.

Currently, the policy on executive pay states that executives cannot hold other jobs outside of ASI. Because scholarships cannot technically require that, that restriction would no longer apply.

Haller said that the change to scholarships actually makes the accounting jobs in ASI easier because financial aid is “very streamlined” through forms that need only be filled out once and checks that are disbursed by the Financial Aid office.

“I kind of always had difficulty with people perceiving it as compensation,” Haller said. “Because you really should be looking at this as more of an opportunity to serve your fellow students, rather than as a source of income. So I think it kind of changes your perspective of why you run for office.”

Senators are currently paid $200 per month for four months of each semester as a “director’s fee.” ASI executives are paid a “fellowship” of $1264 a month.

While executives were previously paid to work throughout the summer, scholarships are generally distributed at the beginning of each fall and spring semester, so ASI will have to work with the financial aid office to be able to pay for summer work, Haller said.

New governing structure

The new structure will eliminate the appointed chief programming officer and chief of staff positions and add three new appointed positions: vice president for academic affairs, vice president for university affairs and vice president of government affairs.

The CPO will be eliminated this June because there is currently no one qualified to fill the position, current CPO Sabrina Ware said in a recent senate meeting. The responsibilities of the CPO will be fulfilled by a new student job that ASI will pay hourly and turn into a “more supervisory role,” Ware said.

The chief of staff position will be eliminated next June because the presidential cabinet will be cut down from about 15 positions to six. The six cabinet members will be chaired by the president.

The elected executive positions will then be called president, executive vice president and vice president of finance.

The senate voted in the new structure at the April 20 meeting and was intended to “better represent the students,” Haller said. Concerns about the amount of work that was put on the executives were brought up when an audit was conducted after the issues with the executive pay policy came up last fall.

“I think from at least speaking to Miriam and the other executives, I personally saw how it’s very difficult for us to be full-time students and also be full-time executives of ASI,” Sen. Logan Vournas, who was elected as next year’s vice president , said. “Even though there’s only a certain office hour requirement a week, I know the amount of work that goes into these positions … I think the position as it’s been now, if we want the most beneficial student leaders, we have to more equally distribute the workload to them.”

The three new vice president positions were formally “secretary” positions in the president’s cabinet, also appointed, but were made into executive positions because of the abnormal workload placed upon the positions. As executive positions, there will be more responsibility, but the compensation will be the about the same as an elected executive, including having their tuition covered by ASI.

“The proposed change is not perfect, but next year’s senate has the chance to make any changes to make it better and fit our students needs,” Sen. Marvin Flores and newly-elected ASI president said in an email.

The process of making changes to the new structure to reflect accountability measures or any other changes will be done through bylaw amendment, which will need to be initiated by a senator. Haller said that there is no formal method of ensuring that current issues with the new structure will be addressed, but that there are several returning senators, so it is likely to occur.

The new executives and officers will take office June 1 this year.