ASG’s first public meeting was not so public

ASG’s first public meeting was not so public

Discussing the student funded budget

Tyler Pugmire / News Editor

The University of San Diego’s Associated Student Government has officially begun their year, as Senate election results were released to the public on Sept. 16, and their first meeting was held the following day. Normally held in Solomon Hall and open to the public, this meeting was in a separate Zoom link from one that was sent out to the student body. 

After 286 virtual voters showed up to the poll, around 5% of the undergraduate population, this year’s senate was officially ready to hold their first meeting. 

There are still six vacancies in the Senate, four of them coming from residential halls, one from the School of Engineering, and one from the College of Arts and Sciences. With the new addition of the at-large senator, there were around 40 people that attended the meeting.

One of the problems that ASG has not addressed was that the Zoom link for the meeting, which was sent out by the Public Relations chair and in ASG’s Instagram bio, contained the wrong link to the meeting. Students who wanted to attend the meeting had to find alternative ways in order to access the correct link; otherwise, they would be left looking at a screen waiting for a different meeting to start. 

For students who missed the meeting, the video recording of it was posted on Sept. 21 on the ASG Youtube Channel.

ASG’s budget was introduced by Finance Chair Cesar Manzo, and was discussed at length. The USD Vista was granted access to view the document during the meeting, but access has since been revoked. According to Manzo, the information should be available on ASG’s website in the next week. ASG’s budget is funded by the mandated student fee for all USD students to pay: for full-time students, it costs $125 per student each semester to fund ASG. That is a total of $1,350,000 for the 2020-2021 school year.

During the meeting, there was a comprehensive list of all items that had been approved or declined from each club or organization that is funded through ASG. There was also a question posed by Fanisee Bias, an elected at-large senator, that questioned when the senators would be allowed to vote on the budget, instead of it simply being for them to view. Madeleine Kreig answered that executive members of ASG had to vote in order to get funding approved before the first meeting. 

One topic of concern that many are waiting to see in the budget is whether or not the College Readership Program will be reinstated, which was campaigned for by president Joey Abeyta and vice president Justin Daus. This was a program that allowed for USD students to access three national newspapers, and a digital subscription to two, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The answers to whether or not students can be informed will hopefully be known when the budget is publicly available next week.