The undergraduate student government approved Office Space Allocation Committee bylaw changes this past week.
Changes include allowing OSAC to look for office spaces outside of Kerckhoff Hall, establishing a two-year time frame for the allocation procedure and setting a tenure for committee membership.
By a 9-0-3 vote, USAC approved the new bylaws during Tuesday’s council meeting.
USAC President Homaira Hosseini said these changes will “facilitate the motivated and productive student groups” and “enable their agendas to run more smoothly.”
The changes were initially proposed in October but were tabled due to Facilities Commissioner Galen Roth’s involvement in a Student Judicial Board case concerning her role in OSAC, which is meant to be a nonpartisan body.
Once the case was concluded, the Constitutional Review Committee approved the bylaw change proposal on Feb. 19 and the changes were forwarded back onto the council’s agenda.
These bylaw changes will “clarify the OSAC process,” Hosseini said.
One major result of the changes is that the facilities commissioner will be officially removed from serving on OSAC. The commissioner formerly served as the committee’s chair, causing the controversy that resulted in Roth’s Judicial Board case.
As a result, OSAC will be independent in its allocation recommendations.
“We encourage OSAC to standardize every aspect of their auditing and interviewing process,” Hosseini said.
“Nowhere in the bylaws or guidelines of USAC can one infer that a specific student group will benefit.”
Internal Vice President Evan Shulman said once the OSAC chair is appointed, the committee will then rank student groups’ applications on a point system based on groups’ stability and history and award office space accordingly.
Hosseini said that as a result of the changes, a job description of the new subcommittee responsible for finding new space for student groups will be added to the OSAC member application.
Another feature of the updated bylaws, she said, is the exact tenure of the committee: July 1 to the end of spring quarter. The former committee guidelines defined the tenure as “one fiscal year,” which caused some confusion.
Furthermore, Hosseini said that the committee will review proposals for mailboxes and lockers so that even student groups without office space can use these resources.
The bylaw changes also set a two-year timeframe on the allocation process, meaning that groups will reapply for offices every two years, she said.
Hosseini said that as a result, student groups will not have a constant fear of reapplication and possibly losing their space.
“This standardizes the number of years so that a subsequent council can’t move a group out of their space, which happened last year,” Roth said.
Roth said that one of the main aspects of the changes involves expanding student group space and not limiting offices to Kerckhoff Hall.
“We’re hoping to limit the demand on the current supply and then increase the supply over time, resulting in more office space for more groups later,” Shulman said.
Roth and her fellow council members also gave reasons for why these changes were necessary.
She said that when the updates were proposed in October, Student Union Director Roy Champawat said changes were already made by a previous council but were never recorded.
“When we had these phantom changes, we became aware that we needed to update the original documents,” she said.
A task force was established recently to find the most up-to-date version of the bylaws, Roth said.
Hosseini said the new bylaws would help open up the process to more groups in a fair way.
“We didn’t want student groups to compete for limited office space but rather focus on finding more space for student groups,” Hosseini said.