A bill written by Sen. Kate Ricart and sponsored by Sen. Laura Ehman intended to iron out the details of redistricting by college was discussed at last week”s ASUI senate meeting.
Ehman said senate has already passed a bill stating senate intends to redistrict by college. The bill also expands on how the new system will be carried out.
“This bill just simply states that we are changing it to be redistricted by college and that the 15 senate seats that we currently have are going to change to be designated by college,” Ehman said.
Ehman said she thought of this bill because ASUI can”t add any senate seats without a 25 percent student body voter turnout, which Ehman said is fairly unlikely.
This is why Ehman said a lot of her fellow senators are in favor of the proposed legislation. It won”t increase the size of senate, meaning they won”t have to figure out how to pay new senators.
“One thing that is the biggest concern for a lot of us is deciding if we should change it to a tiered system where everyone in ASUI gets a change in pay or if we should cut every senator and even out the pay so every senator is paid the same amount,” Ehman said. “Or we increase student fees that are delegated to senators being paid, which a lot of people are not in favor of because they don”t want to increase student fees.”
Ricart supported this bill and said the Redistricting Committee has been trying to figure out how this would be possible, so Ehman”s idea came up at the perfect time.
“So in the midst of this chaotic mess of deciding what we should do, Laura brought up this idea and it worked out really well,” Ricart said. “A lot of people wanted to stay with just 15 senators and it was kind of an ideal plan right now, because if we wanted more than 15 senators we”d have to change the constitution which is kind of hard to do and pretty unlikely that we”ll be able to do it this year.”
Ricart said after Ehman did some math she found they could district senate proportionally by the number of students in each college. She said if the bill passes at Wednesday”s senate meeting, the document will become a part of ASUI Rules and Regulations.
They are still working out some of the kinks, but Ricart said the number of students in a certain college will determine how many senators will represent that college.
“The bill is based on increments of 10 percent of the student body,” Ricart said. “So any college that has less than 10 percent of the student body gets one senator representative. Every college between 10 and 20 percent gets two senators, every college between 20 and 30 percent gets three and so on.”
Ricart said this means every college would be choosing a senator to represent them come election time.
“So if there were three people running within my college I would vote on those three,” Ricart said. “It”s going to make it much more representative of the student body because we won”t end up with having six senators who are CLASS majors and then no one from the College of Natural Resources.”
Ricart said she still hopes in the future the size of senate will be increased so they can have at-large seats as well. However, she said this bill will make it so senate can actually move forward with redistricting without having to wait for a constitutional amendment.
“We still have a lot details we need to figure out with redistricting, but Laura”s idea ended up just being this happy moment because we were like, “Yay we found it,”” Ricart said.
Jessica Gee can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @JessicaC_Gee