During the ASUW Senate session on April 10, they passed a piece of legislation changing the finance policy, a bill to honor a longtime senator, legislation on senator requirements and establishing a committee to oversee a new app.
The first piece of legislation was Senate Bill No. 2615, The Defebaugh Efficiency and Economy of Finance Act. This bill saw a large overhaul of the financial policy, this included both substantive changes and reformatting to make the financial policy easier to navigate.
“My goal for going through this initially is to substantive changes first,” Senator Joel Defebaugh, Senator from the Law College, said. “Then do a collective restructuring.”
After going through the amendments through the Budget and Planning Committee, there were a couple of amendments that saw grammatical changes. Eventually, the bill was passed unanimously.
The second bill was SB No. 2616, Changes to the ASUW Rules and Procedures. This bill changed a portion of the ASUW rules and procedures to name a portion after Defebaugh. This rule mandates that any bill that deas with financial issues is to be referred to the committee that is currently tasked with finance. This is a necessary rule as the committees can change over time, as seen earlier this year.
“This is quite the honor and I am very humbled by it,” Defebaugh said. “I think it truly reflects the hard work that has come from the last couple years of what ASUW has been able to achieve and that is to really take care of not only our own internal money that we get ever year from endowments and student fees, but to really take an aggressive tactic towards the Board of Trustees and new administration on this campus.”
Other senators spoke out in praise of Defebaugh and this bill.
“I just wanted to say that I think it is very important that the senator that this is named after [Defebaugh] takes full recognition for what he has done for ASUW and for the University of Wyoming,” Senator Haley Fried, of the college of arts and sciences, said. “This should go down in fame as the Abernathy Clause has.”
The remaining three pieces of legislation were both introduced and voted on in the same night. This was done because a total of 12 pieces of legislation were introduced in this session and it would be too great of a burden to go through them all next week. The bills that were voted on had to go through a committee of the whole, which is the entire senate because each piece of legislation has to go through a committee before it is heard before the senate.
Senate Bill No. 2617 Correction to the List of Low Interaction Governance Groups in By-Laws was the first bill passed in such a way. According to the bill it was an update to the list in the ASUW by-laws. It was passed unanimously.
Next was SB No. 2621 Changes to Senator Candidate Requirements. This came about because President Ben Wetzel had vetoed a previous piece of legislation SB No. 2617, that dealt with this same issue.
According to the veto statement from Wetzel, it was because of language that would have kept part-time students from becoming senators. He said that it is not stated in their working documents that you must be a full-time student to be a senator. Wetzel said there were also some other inconsistencies with language, but he agreed with the overall intent of the bill.
SB No. 2621 was passed unanimously after the Committee of the Whole made sure that the new bill aligned with what Wetzel said.
The final piece of legislation was SB No. 2626 ASUW Establishment of Rave Guardian Mobile Safety Ad-Hoc Committee and Support for the After-Hours Pedestrian Safety Ad-Hoc Committee Report.
“When we were talking about putting together money for this bill [No. 2626], there was a problem with WyoVocal failing,” Senator Sophia Kwende, of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, said.
Kwende also said that the creation of this committee would help protect and make sure that the Rave Guardian App would succeed. This bill was passed unanimously.
