SGA to elect Green Fee committee: 'We're not joking with this money'

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Courtney Boyd
This whiteboard sat outside of the Bovee University Center Auditorium on Oct. 28, letting Student Government Association members know where their committees were being held this week. The students had been assigned to their permanent committees prior to the meeting that night. (CM Life | Courtney Boyd)

The Student Government Association is hosting the elections for the Green Fees Committee, which was established after the passage of the campus-wide student sustainability fee last academic year.

The fee, with applies $5 to each student account every semester, is meant to fund sustainability projects on campus. The funds will be overseen by a committee of seven members, who will decide what sustainability-based projects the funds will go towards. Currently, the amount that has been raised is still being calculated.

Praise Oyimi, SGA's elections director, said the committee and elections are important because the people handling the money will have a large responsibility to CMU students.

"We're not joking with this money," he said. "We're actually taking this seriously."

Oyimi said anyone can run for the committee, but there are a few requirements such as:

  • Be a full time student
  • Have a GPA of 2.7 or higher
  • Have no disciplinary action or academic probation against you
  • Once they apply, they must collect 100 signatures from the student body to become an official candidate

"Our primary job here is to be students," Oyimi said. "You have to show that you're focused on your studies too, so that if you do decide to take on this responsibility, your studies are intact."

He said that the committee will be self-governed, but will report to Student Affairs. Despite this, he said they will follow SGA's rules outlined in their constitution and bylaws.

Oyimi said interested applicants have until Nov. 1 to submit their form of intent. They then have until Nov. 18 to collect signatures, and elections will run from 8 a.m. Nov. 28 until 5 p.m. Nov. 22. He said those who won the election will be announced at the SGA meeting on Nov. 25.

Committees officially up and running

SGA members were assigned to their now-permanent SGA committees prior to the meeting. While some students ended up in the committee they wanted, others, like Julian Hurtado, got moved around.

Hurtado said he originally wanted to be in the Diversity Committee, but found out 5 minutes prior to the meeting he had been assigned to Outreach and Engagement instead.

"It is what it is," he said. "I'm not too upset about it, since I was in Diversity (Committee) last year."

The Outreach and Engagement Committee is led by Alina Joseph, and she said the goal is to plan events and establish outreach on campus. She had students introduce themselves and share what they did for fun to get some ideas of what "fun" looks like to them.

"This committee is about fun," she said. "We want to have fun, but our fun should bring happiness to somebody else, too. That's what this committee is all about."

Joseph said at the next meeting, they would brainstorm ideas out loud and try to come up with one, small-scale event to do before the semester ends.

In Other Events

  • Next week, the city commissioners will be visiting SGA and answering student questions. President Carolina Hernandez Ruiz had students brainstorm questions with members of their college and share them aloud. 
  • The Senate had to select two senators to serve on the Student Budget  Allocation Committee's Hardship Committee. They selected Emie Diemer and Joseph.
  • Senate Leader Drea Hammond also went over some of the rules and regulations for senators. She also briefly talked about senate projects, and said the senators would share their ideas at the next meeting. 

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