News

ROC institutes policy changes

Constitutional amendment affects fund disbursement

By Mary Payson

Posted on April 29, 2004, at 12:00 a.m.

Three new resolutions were passed by Residents on Campus last week, one dealing with the ROC constitution and the other two with financial policies.

According to Dean Wilber, president of the organization, the changes to the constitution were designed mainly to clarify wording conflicts involving the veto structure.

“The changes makes the Residents on Campus run on more of a checks and balances system,” Wilber said.

The modifications to the constitution are required to be approved by all on-campus residents, and a ballot vote taken on April 22 revealed that 88.9 percent of the voting participants agreed to the changes. The ballot box was outside the ROC office in Memorial Union, and remained unsupervised for a majority of the voting hours, Wilber said. Voters had to reveal their student ID numbers, not only to confirm their on-campus residency, but to also ensure that there was no ballot stuffing, Wilber said.

The remaining resolutions, involving funding, did not require on-campus residents’ approval, Wilber said.

“There’s a legacy in ROC financial policy about whether money should be in a large body or should be in hall governing boards,” Wilber said.

One resolution requires that any leftover student fees, which are used by hall governing boards, be returned to ROC’s general assembly, rather than being rolled over to the next year.

In the past, if all of the money given to the hall was not used, it would roll over to the next semester, whether or not all the same students who paid into the fund were still living in that hall.

“It’s not fair for the [halls] to save the money when it should have been spent on the students who paid into the fund,” said Wilber.

ROC can then give the money out to different organizations for events such as dinners, charity events and battle of the bands, and all activities must be geared toward on-campus residents, Wilber said. HGB’s are still allowed to keep some of the unused money, but only after a request has been made that is voted on by the General Assembly, Wilber said.

Of the $6 ROC fee paid by on-campus residents, $1.25 is given to the hall in which they live and the rest is distributed to other areas of ROC, according to the ROC Financial Policies Statement.

The second resolution involves the freezing of funds.

“Previous policy allowed funds to be frozen if halls missed meetings,” Wilber said. According to Wilber, the policy created a lot of problems, as event planning had to be halted for four weeks if halls missed meetings.

“The new policy requires the HGB to return 2.5 percent of their semester allocations to the General Assembly,” Wilber said.

Meetings are held weekly, and members are allowed three missed General Assembly meetings, four programming committee meetings, and one President’s Council meeting. The power to freeze funds is still an option, but is now a power of the executive board, rather than the vice president of Financial Affairs, Wilber said.

Reasons for freezing funds include suspicions of fraudulent activity and embezzlement, which Wilber said has been a problem in the past.

“[ROC adviser] Jeff Powell’s name is on all the checks that go around,” he said. “If something goes wrong, it’s his credit.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2004, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.