Category: AMS

Since the AMS has not yet mastered the art of putting meeting dates and agendas online yet, the next one is:

Wednesday, July 8, 2009. 6 PM. SUB 206.

Agenda

The most interesting thing will be a presentation from Michelle Aucoin, Director of the UBC 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Secretariat about what to expect when the Olympics happen on campus. If you or anyone you know is curious or concerned about the impacts of the Olympics at UBC, I encourage you show up, and to spread the word! TIP: there’s also free food. If you spread the word about that as well, you may have more success.

For example, UBC released a memo outlining how fields in Thunderbird Park are getting paved over for the duration of the Games. The fields will be handed over to VANOC July 17, 2009.

AMS council tonight. Highlights:

• Provincial Elections campaign budget revealed
• Executive quarterly reports released
• Student Court appointments

It’s a proxy party tonight. Low turnout, lots of substitutes. Leftover food also means a weird dinner combination: Pi-R-Squared with smoked salmon appetizers.

CASA Conference Recap

First up was a presentation to recap the recent CASA policy conference in Calgary. However, the presentation by Blake and Tim, which lasted just shy of forever, spent a lot of time outlining a laundry list of complaints about CASA, all of which have been brought up before. Less time was devoted to what actually occurred at the conference. Summary: Tim and Blake don’t like CASA. I would also suspect CASA doesn’t like Tim and Blake.

Some division within the executive was made apparent immediately when Tom Dvorak stated that CASA sent a letter addressing the AMS’s concerns in late April and that this letter was not shared with other executives or council. Hmmm.

Plenty of boring discussion (if you really care, I can send you notes), but the quote of the night came from Bijan:

“When students go to conferences, they like to have sex. There’s something about having sex with someone you’ll never see again that’s exciting.”

I could put it in context, but it’s so much better without it. Another great quote came from Jeremy McElroy, who noticed Blake’s constant negativity about CASA and asked: Did you have any fun in Ottawa?

In a show of more executive division, Johannes questioned where the numbers came from which outlined the cost of being CASA members, saying that the actual cost is much lower than claimed by Blake and Tim.

Lots of discussion; not much concrete came out of it, other than that documents need to be made available to everyone, and not hoarded. Also, this will continue to be an issue this year.

Provincial Election Campaign Presentation

Tim got up and gave a recap of the provincial election campaign that he ran. While there were successes including lot of work put into awareness and over 500 voters registered by the AMS, the most hotly anticipated part of this presentation was the budget for this campaign.

For background, I’ll refer you again to this Ubyssey editorial as well as a related radical beer tribune post. You can also read the recap from two council meetings ago about how part of this campaign was botched. And, as was confirmed tonight, it was at no small expense.

Without further ado, here is the budget breakdown:

[no idea why the huge gap is here]

Banners	616.85
Printing Costs	3,652.92
Ads in 24 Hrs	18,484.28
Bus Ads	3, 715.25
Website	2,627.29
Buttons	1,220.80
Design Services	445.70
Stickers	195.36
Hand Stamps	33.89
T-shirts	440.99
Videos	1,500.00
Campaigners	3,340.00
TOTAL	36.273.22

The ads in 24 Hrs (the newspaper) are absolutely mind-blowing. Geoff Costeloe was particularly enraged over this, calling it a crazy waste of money. I… concur.

Personally I also took issue with the fact that it took $2,600 to build this webiste. Andrew Carne pointed out that it was based on WordPress. I just buried my head in my hands at that point. Still, nothing compared to the money wasted on ads in 24 Hrs.

The budget is the subject of a Ubyssey article, but here’s the bottom line: it was a waste of money.

Executive Remarks

• Blake’s Broadcast: 1st Quarterly Report available here; everything is in there.
• VP External: 1st Quarterly Report available here; went to CASA conference; over 300 applications received for U-Pass subsidy; Translink is running “Be Part of the Plan”, encourage everyone to participate; looking forward to external policy committee meeting
• VP Academic: 1st Quarterly Report available here; met with residence coordinator at UWaterloo, want to not only increase residence space but also its relevance; met with Michelle Aucoin about Olympics issues; hired student court; remodeled offices; working on TA training, university has allocated funding for it; met with fraternity and sorority representatives; reinstated University Commission
• VP Finance: 1st Quarterly Report available here; AVP Catherine Metrycki did a lot of work to get a lot of stuff online; orientation for clubs with how to navigate AMS finance; looking at marketing for the upcoming year; attended alumni association retreat regarding alumni centre; looking at online payment systems to enable clubs to process credit card payments for memberships or events; Business Operations Committee is looking at Point-Of-Sale options, and AMS businesses contributed $1,114,981 to the AMS last year; preliminary budget prepped, found deficit, looking at budget reductions; budget will be presented next council meeting.
• VP Admin: 1st Quarterly Report available here; met with student development about proposed renovations to Brock Hall; hired assistant
• ECSS: missed this, but 1st Quarterly Report available here

Some Appointments-review stuff about salaries passed

Student Court Appointments

• Emmanuelle Frederic – Chief Justice
• Sara Askari – Judge
• Feruza Abdajalieva – Judge
• Alexander Cooke – Judge
• Wilfred Chan – Judge
• Adam Flanders – Alternate Judge
• Jordan Snel – Alternate Judge
• Constance Chan – Clerk

Conflict of Interest Motion

A motion came to council which would have required any member of council who also serves as a director of an organization which the AMS conducts business with to remove themselves from any In Camera sessions of council dealing with the other organization.

The goal appears to be the exclusion of UBC BoG reps, specifically Bijan, from In Camera sessions. However, while BoG is the most obvious example, there are probably other people on council who would also be affected by this and would also be required to sit out of In Camera sessions from time to time.

This was a Matt Naylor motion, who was not present tonight. His proxy, Alex Lougheed, did not feel comfortable motivating the motion since it was not his. I
t was eventually sent to Code and Policy. Should be interesting to see if this comes back to council sometime in the future.

Olympics Motion

Bijan brought a motion to invite Michelle Aucoin, who is in charge of Olympics stuff at UBC to present at the next council meeting for an hour. There should have been no discussion about this, but there was some. This also should have never been a motion in the first place, but it was. (Council doesn’t need to pass motions to invite people to present to council.) Anyways, next meeting, look forward to an hour of Olympics presentation/discussion.

Committee Appointments

• Fundraising and Sponsorship Committee: John MacLean

Dave Tompkins: “Like the guy from Die Hard?” (Different speling, unfortunately. Dave looked it up on IMDB as a distraction from council.)

• External Policy Committee: Dusty C.

Next meeting: July 8.

After a month-long break for exams, AMS council met tonight. Highlights:

1. AMS to reimburse AUS $35,062.04 for accumulated Arts County Fair debt.
2. Azim Wazeer, Joel Mertens and Josh Sealey recommended as new student senators
3. Lots of committee appointments
4. Whistler Lodge improvements
5. External Office to stop distributing some provincial election campaign materials deemed partisan, must remove some already-posted campaign materials deemed out of line with lobbying priorities

Since this is the start of a new year, in a way, there were many new faces and lots of introductions to be made. Dave Tompkins is speaker for another year. Sheldon proudly mentions that he and Dave are the only ones in the room who have been with the AMS since since the last century (last millennium actually, as someone else astutely pointed out.)

Executive Remarks:

Blake’s Broadcast: Lots of meetings with UBC admin; Block Party and Great Farm Trek; Hired a new assistant; Held student-staff appreciation lunch; New SUB negotiations with university are progressing, albeit slower than hoped for.

VP Finance: Looking at some renos to get some more office space; Block Party brought in ~$100,000 in revenues, but expenses were a bit higher than that; recently resolved a student fee issue that resulted in AMS getting ~$500k they were due; Blue Chip will be getting renovations to be fully equipped to do chilled drinks over the summer.

VP Admin: New SUB survey completed and results will be posted online soon in condensed, more readable form; new water fountains coming this month and will encompass both drinking fountains and bottle-filling stations; AMS will try to phase out bottled water at their outlets and sell AMS re-useable water bottles.

VP Academic/UA: Has been liaising with RCMP regarding olympic security and liquor policy issues; Sgt. Dan Wendland is gone with replacement coming this month; UNA and RCMP are working on a noise by-law to bring to the province; has been talking to provost and CUPE about TA training issues; NSSE founder will be making presentation tomorrow; who wants ice cream?

VP External: Lots of work on provincial election campaign; Translink AGM is coming up; looked into applicability of residential tenancy act on campus.

ECSS: mostly has been doing a whole lot of hiring for the upcoming year.

Code and Policy: Will look into why Code places restrictions on holding more than one AMS position at a time.

Senate Appointments: Student Senate Caucus went through a number of applications, did some interviews and ended up picking Azim Wazeer, Joel Mertens and Josh Sealy. There was some concern about whether the advertisement for this position was done, but given that way more people applied for the appointments than for the elections seems to indicate something was done right. Motion passed unanimously. Joel Mertens returns to council as Senate rep. Awkward moment: Guillaume Houle tried to get Geoff Costeloe to say that the meeting to pick the new senators took place during a hockey game, to no avail.

SUS Referendum Results: SUS recently had passed a referendum to index their student fee to CCPI (Canadian Consumer Price Index) and needs AMS to rubber stamp this. There are multiple versions of the CCPI; some debate over which one to use since it was not specified in the referendum question. Although SUS finances were admittedly fine, they feel is more sustainable and hopefully saves them from going to referendum every few years to raise it. SUS is the first constituency to index their fee to inflation. Motion passed.

Arts County Fair Debt Repayment: As expected, discussion on this item was quite lengthy. I won’t summarize it right now and the arguments for and against are already known, I hope. Before I give myself carpal tunnel typing it all out, let’s see what the Ubyssey comes up with. End result: 23-7 in favour of repaying $35,062.04 to the AUS for accumulated Arts County Fair debt.

Commitee Appointments: Sorry for the lack of last names, but Dave generally doesn’t put them up, so if I don’t already know it, it won’t be there. Also, I apologize in advance since I’m certain there is a mistake or two in here.

CiTR: Duncan McHugh, Aaron Nakama, Tahara Bhate, Bijan Ahmadian
Irving K. Barber Library Stewardship Committee: Crystal Hon, Kyle Warwick
LEAD: Tahara Bhate, Bijan Ahmadian, Lin Watt
Oversight: Jimmy Yan, Joel Mertens, Laura Silvester, Kyle Warwick, Tony Yang
Budget Committee: Kyle Warwick, “Ben”, “K”
Appointments Review: Kat, Aaron Sihota, Tim Chu
Business Operations Committee: Guillaume Houle, Laura Silvester, Aaron Sihota, Joel Mertens, Hafiz Dossa
Impacts: Hannes Dempewolf, Madeleine Schaefer, Kyle Warwick
Sexual Assault Support Services Fund: Elena Kusaka, Pavani
Code and Policy: Andrew Carne, Tahara Bhate, Matt Naylor, Blake Frederick, Jeremy Wood, Emily Griffiths
Campus events committee: Fraser, Carolee Changfoot, Tony Yang, Lin Watt
Fundraising and sponsorship committee: Madeleine Schaefer, Tony Yang, Tagg Jefferson
Campus Planning and Development: Jeremy McElroy, Andrew carne, “Pierce”
Renovations Planning: Andrew Carne, Jimmy Yan, Carolee Changfoot
Sub Renew: Luke(GSS), Jeremy McElroy
AMS/GSS Health and Dental Plan Committee: Matt Naylor
Equity: Geoff Costeloe, Tim Chu, Kat
Executive Renumeration: Aaron Sihota, Jimmy Yan
External Policy Committee: Matt Naylor, Kat, Tahara Bhate, Kyle Warwick, Elena Kusaka, Kiran, Iggy Rodriguez

SAC Appointments:

SAC Member: Elin Tayyar
Bookings Commissioner: David Le
Buildings Commissioner: Kyle Lai
Special Projects Commissioner: Cindy Zhan
Art Gallery Commissioner: Jeremy Jaud
Club Commissioner: Elaine Chin
Administrative Commissioner: Sima Shoker

AMS Preliminary 2009/10 Budget: 2008/09 highlights include higher than expected business operations revenue ($1.165M) contributing to an extra $440k which is to be allocated to other funds. However, with the food-housing merger, the AMS expects to lose some of its conference catering business to UBC Housing and Food next year. 08/09 ended with a small surplus.
09/10 forecasts $13.8M of revenue, with another small surplus at the end of the year. Point of interest: Rogers will no longer be providing free Blackberrys to AMS executives.

AMS Whistler Lodge/ AMS Office Renovations:

1. $21,900 for the Whistler Lodge, including: $1,800 for bunk bed improvements to combat bed lice; $6,600 for painting and patching walls; $9,000 for carpeting; $3,000 to build a boot storage area near the lodge entrance.
2. $16,000 to move, divide and create some new offices in the SUB for some of their employees.

Code Changes 2009: VP Admin Assistant: Crystal gets to hire an assistant to maintain her sanity.

Appointments Review Committee: Concern expressed that $8/h is too low; how wages are set and hours calculated; differentiation between wage and salary positions; whether some positions are necessary. Mostly however, I was going through a post-11pm zone out for the majority of the discussion. Wages set for the following positions:

1. Equity and Diversity Coordinator – $9.62/hr
2. Assistant to VP Admin – $8/hr
3. Executive Projects Assistant –$8/hr
4. Internship Coordinator (AMS Connect Assistant Coordinator) – $10.23/hr
5. Campus Development Commissioner –$8/hr
6. First Year Seminar Commissioner – $8/hr
7. International Students Commissioner – $8/hr
8. Childcare Commissioner – $8/hr
9. Olympics Commissioner – $8/hr
10. AVP External – $10,380
    per annum”

Blake ceasing and desisting: You should probably just read the motion for yourself:

BIRT AMS Council direct the President to cease and desist any imposition of deadlines regarding the submission of motions above and beyond what is specifically enumerated in the AMS Code of Procedures, Bylaws and Constitution

This motion came from Matt Naylor. Background: AMS council meetings are always Wednesday evenings. Sometimes, motions would come up and councilors would claim that they were previously unaware of the motion or had not received supporting documentation. At Blake Frederick’s first meeting as president, he asked that agenda items be in by the previous Friday.

This was misinterpreted as being a hard deadline imposed unilaterally, when Code actually says agenda items must be in 72h prior to the meeting, which would be Sunday 6 pm. Blake stated that he was merely trying to give councilors the courtesy of extra time to look things over; he has never rejected motions that come in after Friday but meet the 72h timeline; he will gladly follow council’s wishes on this topic; felt a bit slighted that the motion came the way it was, he thought it would have been more appropriate as an informal discussion period.

Matt simply felt that sometimes committees need a bit more time to work on items and Friday was too early; he also didn’t intend the motion to sound as confrontational as it does; also felt that if the deadline needed to be changed it should come from Code and Policy, not the president.

A lot of councilors appreciated having the weekend to go over agenda items and the extra time available to consult with constituents, if necessary. Andrew Carne advocated for the pragmatic solution: send out preliminary agendas on Friday with as much as possible included (especially the more involved motions) with the final agenda sent out Monday. Sounds like a good plan. Motion failed 15-3.

External Lobbying: So maybe that $30,000 was not spent so well. This entry is too long already, so for background I will direct you to this Ubyssey editorial as well as a related radical beer tribune post. There was quite an in depth discussion, but I will kept it shallow cause I’m tired.

The AMS external office recently released a report card on the parties’ platforms in this election which was up on the AMS website. It has now been removed, but I’ve uploaded it here. Rating the parties? That makes the AMS look partisan when they are not supposed to be; extremely partisan since the BC liberals got a big fat F. Council decided to pull the report card off their website, and not distribute it anymore.

Also, have you seen ads like this around campus?

Well, AMS council never said that lowering tuition fees was one of the principles they were lobbying on in this provincial election, so these posters are misrepresenting the AMS’s priorities. Not to mention only the Greens are promising tuition reduction so it could also be considered partisan. All of these posters are to be taken down.

Essentially, this boondoggle was all due to the fact that the external office didn’t follow proper procedures when putting together the campaign. It made a campaign based on the VPX’s priorities and judgement, not council’s or the External Policy Committee’s. So, the $30,000 spent on the provincial election campaign? A waste of resources on a partially botched campaign and the AMS admits it.

Class dismissed. Next Meeting May 27.

Today is the last day to vote in this year’s AMS referendum. The results of the four questions will determine if we continue to have a U-pass program, if we’ll start subsidizing refugee students, if we’ll build a new SUB, and if we’ll make some by-law changes. The reason you need to we cajoled, marketed, and advertised into voting in this referendum by everything from t-shirts to 99 B-line ads is that according to the AMS’s bylaws, certain things cannot be enacted by a simple vote of council, but need to get a mandate from students directly through a referendum. These things are any fee increases, and any changes to the bylaws themselves. Since referenda are expensive to run, inherently risky results-wise, and have a high quorum level (10% of students), they often fail.

Referenda used to be run more often (about once a year) before the advent of the U-pass. They failed quite often due to lack of quorum, or lack of support (I’ll update with numbers as soon as I find out). Now, the AMS is running referenda less often, to coincide with the U-pass renewals every three years, which draw large numbers of voters. That means that other question can piggy-back on the U-pass and basically ensure quorum.

Now that’s fine as far as it goes, but here’s a different idea for how referenda can be used. Instead of once every while, and only when absolutely necessary for a fee or by-law change, a new type of referendum system could be invented to help with the democratic deficit in the AMS. As we all know, the AMS isn’t especially representative because of low voter turnout, ignorance, and apathy. And this ultimately erodes the AMS’s efficacy and power as a democratic organization. Imagine a real direct democracy system that asked students about issues. Regular yearly or bi-yearly referenda on issues would certainly draw lower voter turnout than a U-pass renewal for instance, but they would give the AMS clear mandates to address various types of topics in a certain way. The results of such referenda need not even be technically binding – they could be “consultative referenda” of sorts. A win could result in automatic placement on AMS council’s agenda. If a question on such a consultative referendum had a lot of support, there would be political pressure in council to enact whatever it is. The point is to get ideas and issues to filter up from the grassroots student towards the AMS through a more populist issues-focused process than elections, which tend to be more about personality and networks. For this to work, many details would have to be thought out: how to qualify for placement on the ballot, how to administer/fund regular referenda, how much clout the results should be given, and so on.

Essentially though, direct democracy may have benefits to the AMS in terms of political engagement. Right now, I wouldn’t say that it’s impossible to get something onto council’s agenda as a normal student (if you go through an executive), but there’s certainly no established process for doing so. And even if something does get on the agenda, councilors are often unsure of what the popular opinion toward it would be. A regular consultative referendum system would provide both a mechanism to filter ideas up through the organization, and provide political consensus behind them. Some countries (New Zealand, Switzerland) have frequent policy referenda. Perhaps we can learn from them.