Legislation could help professors and students find cheap, informative textbooks
UCSU discussed several important issues last Thursday night, including lowering textbook prices for students and putting in street lights over Kittredge parking lot.
The CU delegates to statewide student organization ASC announced they attended a meeting on Sunday, and voted yes to a campaign that would draft legislation that would help lower textbook prices. The legislation would get rid of “bundled” textbooks, or textbooks that come with CDs, because these textbooks tend to be more expensive. Legislation would also help professors throughout Colorado find books that were both accurate and informative and cheap.
The Tri-Executives announced that they are working with the Boulder Police Department to put streetlights over the Kittredge parking lot in order to increase the safety of the parking lot.
Five new members of the Distinguished Speakers Board, Jessica Metzler, Rachel Lieberman, Adam Berlinberg, Eric Wilson, and Perry Kreusser, were ratified at the meeting. Richard Einstein was also ratified as a new member of the Legislative Affairs Commission.
UCSU council members spent the majority of the meeting debating on a new bill proposed by Journalism School Senator Veronica Lingo called the Paper Proxies Bill.
When a member of the Legislative Council cannot make it to a meeting, there are a few different ways he or she can cast an absentee vote, or proxy, if the council is voting on a bill for that particular meeting. The most common way is by sending another person in the council member’s stead, who will vote on the bill for them. Council members can also do a Paper Proxy, which means they send on a piece of paper which way they would vote on various bills. The paper proxy is given to another voting council member who is present at the meeting, and this council member casts the vote for the absent member.
The Paper Proxies Bill would prevent excessive use of paper proxy and encourage sending an actual person substitute instead. The bill would also require council members to alert the president of the legislative council when he or she will be absent from a meeting at least three hours ahead of time, and to have a proxy ready by then.
The bill was passed into second reading. The first reading vote was an extremely close one; the council ended up voting 9 to 9 on the bill, so Legislative Council President M. Boyce Postma cast the tie-breaking vote to pass it.
