SG confirms judicial commissioners, introduces proposal

Boston University’s Student Government confirmed judicial commissioners, a rules committee chair and an environmental cabinet director for the academic year at Monday night’s Senate meeting.

The president’s address, which was delivered by Vice President of Finance Bernie Lai in the absence of President SaraAnn Kurkul, talked about upcoming SG campus engagements and presented a budget report for the semester. SG’s 2017-18 budget totals $54,401, according to Lai.

Senators unanimously confirmed College of General Studies freshman Michael Eschmann and College of Arts and Sciences senior Charles Welsh as the new judicial commissioners, who will be responsible for ensuring proposals comply with SG’s constitution.

Eschmann said during the meeting that since he is new to SG, he understands that he has much to learn and is excited to take on the task.

“I am very eager and willing and devoted to be working here,” Eschmann said. “I wouldn’t sign up for anything that I wasn’t committed about, passionate about, so this is something I take seriously.”

In addition, CAS Sen. Michael Meagher was approved as the new rules committee chair and said he plans to revise the language of the constitution and bylines.

“The language needs to be revised [to be] clear and precise,” Meagher said. “We need to go through and reword everything that needs to be reworded to make it as understandable as possible.”

Dione Sun, a junior in the Questrom School of Business, was confirmed unanimously as the director of the Environmental Affairs cabinet, and said she plans to take on initiatives this year to promote its mission, including hosting a book swap event and introducing a sustainability education program.

“We want to increase awareness about how much kids know on campus about the resources they have, and some issues that we’ve been having is quantifying how successful we really are in our initiatives,” Sun said.

In addition, Senate Chair Octavio Vidal introduced a proposal to dissolve the Student Affairs, Communications, Finance and Academic Climate committees, which will be voted upon in Senate’s next meeting next week and will require two-thirds approval from Senate to be put into effect.

Vidal said after the meeting that this dissolution is intended to reduce redundancy between departments and committees and has the potential to bolster collaboration between cabinet and Senate.

“That has been a huge goal for us this year, and by having the cabinet come with us to all the Senate meetings, which was not the case last year,” Vidal said. “It sort of shows the Senate what the cabinet is up to.”

Lai predicted the proposal will pass next week.

“The Senate committees were designed to give senators a role aside from coming to the meetings, but cabinet does a lot of the things,” Lai said after the meeting, “by dissolving these and pulling senators directly into cabinet, it’ll create a better relationship between the two.”

Several senators said that they are pleased with the confirmations and look forward to vote on the dissolution of the committees next week.

Ruiya Wang, a freshman in the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said she believed the standing committees should be dissolved to allow for more collaborative, effective work in SG.

“I think they could work together to make a better plan,” Wang said, “so with the two groups, I don’t think working together would be good — one big group would be better.”

CAS Sen. Brittany Auyoung said she is interested to see the process of combining the standing committees into larger, more cohesive departments.

Auyoung also said she hopes to see SG take action with environmental issues on campus.

“BU is our home for four years, and it is very important to me to not smell smoke when I walk outside,” the sophomore said.

Nehemiah Dureus, a College of Engineering senator, said he is glad to see Senate members more involved during their meetings.

“I’m pretty happy to see that Senate now is starting to open up about questioning people when it comes to cabinet appointments, we had a problem last year — they stopped doing their the job halfway through the semester,” Dureus, a junior, said.

Dureus said he looks forward to next week’s meeting when SG will bring in Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore to field questions about the Wheelock College merger.

Noor Adatia contributed to the reporting of this article.