Just like last year, Vox is helping you get on top of “news you can use” with an excessively comprehensive review of last year’s important news stories. You’ve already heard of foolish things former freshman have done. Now, we cover the other on-campus issues that made headlines; Healy Pub, Uribe, and unions come after the jump.

Cash rules everything around me

The Georgetown University Student Association is your undergraduate student government.

Between a president, vice president, cabinet, and 25-member Senate (elected at-large and from dorms), the student association funds initiatives such as Summer Fellows, subsidized LSAT courses, free newspapers, and weekend GUTS busses.

Despite cleaning up its act in recent years, GUSA is also a source of endless entertainment: botched elections, interpersonal bickering, toothless resolutions, and campaign silliness.

Most importantly, though, GUSA allocates the student activities fee that students pay every semester.

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Tomorrow night, the Georgetown University Student Association Finance and Appropriation Committee, feeling the need to submit a budget for student activiteis to the full Senate, will pass a budget on to the GUSA Senate with allocations for all of the advisory boards except for the Student Activities Commission. The FinApp Committee will allocate money to SAC, which still has not agreed to make its members’ votes on club funding public, in the coming weeks in a separate allocation.

FinApp member Colton Malkerson (COL ’13) said that members of FinApp made the decision after a meeting with Director of Student Programs Erika Cohen-Derr, Associate Dean for Finance & Administration Lynn Hirschfeld, and Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Jeanne Lord where they advised FinApp to pass a budget which would allocate funds to the other five advisory boards, and then work out the remaining issues with SAC.

Members of SAC will meet with these administrators in next week, before administrators, SAC, and FinApp members meet all together to try to reach compromise. If they cannot reach an agreement there, an impartial administrator may decide whether SAC needs open votes. However, FinApp members have indicated that they are very reluctant to bring in direct administrative involvement.

Because of rules that stipulate the budget must allocate to all boards, the budget they will pass on to the full Senate will technically allocate an actual dollar amount—$0—to SAC.

Reporting by Eric Pilch

At the start of the new club funding process, the Student Activities Commission requested $35,000 from the Georgetown University Student Association, the new guardians of our Student Activities Fee, only to be scoffed at: in the draft budget it proposed just before Spring Break, the Georgetown University Student Association Finance and Appropriations Committee suggested that SAC get a total allocation of a mere $12,500.

The FinApp Committee meant this miserly counter-’offer’ as a rebuke of SAC for having refused to adopt some of GUSA’s six reforms for advisory boards—”in recognition that the Commission is in good standing with some, but not all, of the reform proposals,” in the words of the FinApp committee. But if the committee hoped its penny-pinching would coerce SAC into adopting the remaining reforms, for the moment, they’re going to be disappointed. In an e-mail to SAC club leaders sent today, SAC Chair Ethel Amponsah (NHS ’11) tells clubs to brace themselves for the limitations the meager GUSA allocation will place on SAC allocation, even as it dips into its reserves.

“I would like to note that SAC has complied with 4 out of the 6 recommendations in an effort to compromise with the Committee,” she wrote. “The draft budget reduces SAC’s allocation budget by about 15%. Please consider how this will effect your organizational budget as this reduction will be felt across all SAC groups …. FinApp would like to mandate that SAC use the excess funds for its allocation budget. However, that is not sustainable as within two years the excess funds would be depleted and SAC would still receive insufficient funds from FinApp.”

SAC’s reserves, she said, are currently at $215,000, and the Office of Student Affairs has suggested that it should maintain reserves of at least $150,000.

In response to Amponsah’s claims, Chair of the FinApp Committee Nick Troiano (COL ’11) said that SAC had only made good faith efforts towards completing three of the six reforms GUSA would like it to make. They are still not disclosing how their individual members vote on allocations, he said, they do not yet have a plan to spend down their reserves, and they do not have a method for picking their leadership that is accountable to the student body.

Read more, plus Amponsah’s full message after the jump, and a statement from members of the FinApp Committee after the jump.

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This week’s meeting of the Georgetown University Student Association Senate included a heated contest to fill a vacant seat on the Finance and Appropriations committee, and a denouncement of Eric Cusimano’s extracurricular involvements. Here’s the wrap:

Finance and Appropriations Committee Post Filled

In perhaps the most contentious part of the meeting, Senator Ben Bold (COL’13) was selected by the full Senate to fill a vacancy on the Finance and Appropriations Committee. During his time for remarks, Bold said he had closely followed the work of the Finance and Appropriations Committee and had fully supported the funding board reform. Bold ran against Senator Matthew Ginsberg (COL’11), who said that he was suited for the job because he had an interest in financial allocations and had served as a director for the Corp.

During the debate over the confirmation, some Senators appeared to argue that Senator Bold was competent and self-motivated, and therefore should be opposed. Speaker Adam Talbot (COL ’12) warned against a “leadership accretion” on the FinApp Committee, while FinApp Chair Nick Troiano (COL ’11) said, “Our committee has enough ambition and self-motivated people … We have to distribute this energy to all the committees.” Ultimately, however, Bold’s attributes were deemed more of a good thing than a bad thing, and he was approved by a 10-8 vote.

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After last week’s high-stakes and controversial Georgetown University Student Association meeting, where they passed comprehensive funding reform legislation, this week’s meeting hewed closer to classic GUSA style: longer than necessary, peppered with perfunctory legislation, and largely innocuous.

The 2010 GUSA Presidential Debate

The meeting began with a discussion about the much-anticipated GUSA Presidential Debate. Speaker Adam Talbot (COL ’12) said it will be “99 percent sure taking place on Wednesday, 89 percent sure taking place in Sellinger Lounge,” with the doubt over the location due to the fact that they have not yet reserved the Lounge. GUSA Parliamentarian Sam Ungar (COL ’12) said that the debate would include all four presidential candidates, and feature questions from representatives of the major campus media organizations.

Public Comment Legislation

The first bill passed by the GUSA Senate changed the GUSA bylaws to require the Finance and Appropriations Committee to convene a public hearing within seven days of drafting of a budget so that representatives of advisory boards can voice concerns they may have over the budget. The bill also requires the speaker to allow for a period of public comment during the general senate meeting at which the budget will be voted on.

The bill faced essentially no opposition, mostly because it wasn’t changing the current practices. As Speaker Talbot said when he voiced his support for the bill, “The seven day waiting period is already sort of institutionalized… and I think it was sort of connoted in the wording that that time was there for individual chairs of the advisory boards to come and voice their concerns.” The bill was approved unanimously.

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On Thursday, Vox published a letter that Student Activities Commission Chair Ethel Amponsah (NHS ’11) had sent to student club leaders challenging the various funding reforms the Georgetown University Student Association is working to enact. In her e-mail, she referenced another letter she had sent to GUSA specifically addressing the six reforms GUSA had said all of the funding boards must achieve, or they would withhold student activity fees from the boards.

Vox has obtained the letter from Amponsah, which she sent on December 4. In her letter, she maintains that there is already an appeals process for clubs that go before SAC, SAC meetings are already open to the public, and that SAC is already in the process of creating a means for clubs to get lump sum funding. (Disclosure: Amponsah and I participated in an After School Kids group together our freshman year).

Readers have also sent Vox a letter that members of GUSA’s Finance and Appropriations Committee, including Chair Nick Troiano (COL ’11), sent to club leaders in response to Amponsah’s e-mail on Friday, January 29.

“We’d like to set the record straight,” it reads. “Our proposed reforms seek to make the student activities funding process more democratic, accountable and efficient. Let us be clear, our sole intention is to make the system work better for you.”

Finally, there’s a letter from the Center for Social Justice Advisory Board for Student Organizations to its student clubs in response to GUSA’s proposed reforms.

“If officially passed, this legislation would greatly hinder ABSO’s ability to represent, actively advocate, or secure funding for you,” the letter reads.

Read all three letters in full after the jump!

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GUSA’s new look

This Sunday, the Georgetown University Student Association Senate had a heated debate about whether to condemn the protesters who interrupted General Petraeus’ speech in Gaston Hall. (They did, with lots of Senators stressing that they weren’t endorsing the war. Don’t worry, we got it.)  One member presented a bill to strip the advisory board representatives who sit on the Funding Board of their votes, giving GUSA more oversight of the process.

THE NEW LOGO: From Windows to Vampire Weekend, everyone is rebranding themselves these days. President Calen Angert (MSB ’11) kicked off yesterday’s GUSA meeting with a presentation of the long-awaited GUSA logo. Angert promised the logo didn’t contain any “ripoffs of any networks,” a reference to the last logo, which Vox commenters pointed out looked a lot like this.

The logo was scrutinized by the Senate before coming to a vote at the end of the meeting, when they unanimously approved it.

THE PETRAEUS PROTESTERS: In a very contentious vote, the GUSA senate passed a bill that “condemns the disrespectful and improper actions of the Georgetown University students who disrupted the lecture of General David H. Petraeus.” But don’t worry, politicos—that’s not a GUSA endorsement of U.S. foreign policy. Colton Malkerson (COL ’13), the sponsor of the bill, stressed that the bill was steering clear of the wider debate over the war in Afghanistan.

“It’s not stating an opinion on the debate, it is not siding with the opinions that Petraeus had said … its just recognizing the breach of policy,” Malkerson said.

In the debate that followed Colton’s presentation of the bill several Senators denounced the protesters and voiced support for the bill, but others argued that GUSA was out of place issuing a such a condemnation. Senator Nick Troiano (COL ’11), however, said that he hoped the University brought consequences to the students who participated in the protest.

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