A note of controversy surrounded the proceedings as the Student Government Association (SGA) ratified the results of the fall election for the senate and the Northeastern Programming Board in a special meeting on Nov. 2.
Before the vote to ratify the election and the swearing-in of the seven senator-elects who were present, Senator Evonna Caldwell asked Vice President Denise Franklin, who oversees senate meetings, to open debate on those who were elected. Franklin informed Caldwell that senators who were elected by the students were not subject to debate in the ratification process.
In a development that surfaced after the meeting adjourned, Caldwell was apparently objecting to only one senator-elect, Evelyn Nazario-Rose, according to Franklin and SGA Speaker Kimberly Murphy. Caldwell’s objections to Rose’s election allegedly were because of Nazario-Rose’s past terms in student government, which included a year as SGA president which concluded last spring.
This past summer, Murphy discovered a voicemail on the speaker’s office phone left for M. Morgan, former SGA speaker, left by Nazario-Rose in December 2005. In the voicemail, Nazario-Rose asked Morgan to alter or erase tapes made of an SGA meeting, which was closed to the public in violation of the Illinois Open Meetings Act, a meeting that an Independent reporter was made to leave.
The vote to ratify the 2006 fall election results passed despite the objections by Caldwell, by a vote of 5-2, with Caldwell and Murphy voting against ratification. Murphy was pragmatic when asked about Nazario-Rose’s election to the senate: “She got voted in, that tells you something.” Caldwell was unavailable for comment, as she was excused from the meeting along with another senator shortly after ratification of the election results.
The seven senators who were sworn-in include Mike Hess, Erik Consuegra, Brad Bowen, Ricardo Garcia, Mary Whitehead, Jose Luis Soler and Geoffrey Gayares. Nazario-Rose, Cruz Angon and Michael Racines were not present at the meeting and can be sworn in at the Thursday, Nov. 9 senate meeting.
The Nov. 9 meeting will also see funding for a Hip-Hop Club event on the agenda, as well as consider the charter for the Honors Society and the constitution for the Independent. Business will only be considered, however, if quorum is reached, which has been a problem at recent meetings, resulting in special meetings held to replace those that could not reach quorum. Quorum is the presence of 10 members of the 25-member student government.
In the only other item of official business, the senate voted 9-1-2 to reorganize a combined spending bill into five separate bills, so that each individual funding request could be more easily identified.
Newly elected Senator Ricardo Garcia dove right into his duties, getting into a verbal scrape with Franklin about why the spending requests had to be separated into their own bills. Franklin’s response to the rookie senator: “Because it’s a very large amount of money, honey.”
The amount of funding approved for the five separate student club proposals was over $13,000, which is considered an excessive amount for any one or two clubs to request.