By Jenna Duncan, News Staff

After issues of transparency within the Student Government Association (SGA) were raised recently, at Monday’s Joint Senate meeting an amendment was made to the SGA Constitution to eliminate time logs for the President and Vice Presidents.
To increase transparency, the Student Government Association (SGA) amended its Constitution at a Joint Senate meeting Monday to eliminate time logs for the President and Vice Presidents.
In place of the time logs, which require executive board members to record how they spend their time working for the organization each week, board members will submit monthly reports about the work they have done, moving the system from time-based to performance-based.
‘The bottom line is someone can sit in the office and play games all day for 40 hours a week, and that doesn’t really come through in the current time log system,’ President Ryan Fox said in the meeting. ‘We’ve attempted to keep time logs; it’s just not feasible. … It’s something that’s really hard to track.’
The amendment passed with a vote of 50-0-4.
In recent weeks, SGA has been called out by senators such as junior political science Jordan Clark as not being transparent, and not knowing what has been going on within the organization. With this amendment, Fox said he hopes to engage students and take stress off of the executive board.
This was changed because, prior to three and a half years ago, the executive board was only able to take three classes a semester and one during summer. This allowed more time to sit in the office and complete time logs, but now that the executive board takes a full course load or is on co-op it has become increasingly difficult, Fox said. Over the years tracking has become more challenging because the executive board now has a heavier workload in addition to the required hours, which has led to many after-hours e-mails and quick phone calls throughout the week that add up.
‘They evolved into something they weren’t supposed to be,’ Fox said.
To alleviate some of the stress involved with the strict minimum hour requirements, 40 hours a week for the president, 30 hours for the vice president of student affairs and the vice president for financial affairs, and 20 hours for the remaining three executive board members, Senate added language to the amendment that the hours would be expected per week over the course of the semester.
The reports will be due within five business days at the end of each month, and will include bullet points and summaries of all the projects that are ongoing and other things that pertain to students.
When proposed, questions were raised about being able to hold the executive board accountable for their time commitments since there are required hours in the document, but there is no way of checking it.
‘It isn’t really fixing anything,’ Clark said. ‘It doesn’t make any sense in my opinion to have a certain amount of hours then say it’s performance based and the hours don’t matter.’
Additionally, Fox said he hopes the amendment will make students who aren’t involved in Senate aware of what SGA does since the reports will be available online.
‘It just goes back to the campaign, one of the big things was making SGA more accessible and this will do that in a variety of ways,’ Fox said.