After four years at Long Beach State, health science major Dominick Martinez is attempting to transition into student government as Associated Students Inc. treasurer.
He cites his experiences as building manager of the University Student Union and treasurer for the Sigma Chi fraternity, an organization which disassociated from the university during investigations into sexual misconduct allegations made toward its members, according to the Press Telegram.
If elected treasurer, Martinez would like to address food insecurity, financial transparency and establish on-campus legal clinics and polling places.
“It’s kind of inconvenient that CalFresh has two outreach days a year,” Martinez said. “So one thing [we can do] would be to see if we can work with CalFresh to do maybe one outreach day a month of the semester.”
The treasurer candidate said that one way to expand the on-campus presence of CalFresh, a program that helps people of low-income buy food, is to get ASI to work with the university to find a second office for the program. Martinez also wants to start a collaboration between ASI Communications and the student-run organizations to promote the latter’s activities with the goal of increasing participation in student clubs.
“The organizations don’t necessarily need help with the operations themselves, they’re very self-sustaining,” Martinez said. “I think it would help if ASI used its presence to show the organizations off more. Week of Welcome definitely helps … but that’s only once a semester for two days.”
Data collection will play a role in Martinez’ goals for an on-campus legal clinic and financial transparency. The health science major wants to initially use a broad legal clinic to find out what students’ specific needs are and use surveys to discover what people want to know about how ASI uses its funds.
“I don’t want to flood people with information, but I want to know what their questions are,” Martinez said. “Assuming is never good when you’re trying to represent any kind of group.”
Martinez’ goals are rounded out by the desire to get a polling place for U.S. government elections on-campus, the lack of which he has had issues with himself.
“When the presidential elections were coming up, I didn’t get a chance to vote because I couldn’t make it to any polling place within the time frame because I was either on campus or at work,” Martinez said. “I barely made it to the midterm elections in November… that was the last time I was able to vote anything.”