After failing to meet quorum, the Feds fall general meeting could not move forward as planned and shifted towards a more informal information session.
The meeting, which took place Oct. 27, was required to have 200 members in attendance in order to begin. According to Feds President Chris Lolas, just over 100 members were present.
“We did our best but at the end of the day, students just aren’t interested in audits and bylaws,” Lolas said. “It’s something we’ll have to review and figure out a solution in the future but for now it is what it is.”
As a result, Feds will aim to provide better incentives for students to attend their general meetings in the future.
“We’ve had free food here at this one, we can try that…Last year we did town halls after the meeting, so we can try something like that to see if people would be interested. We’ll have to give it a lot of thought,” Lolas said.
Lolas also believes that the scheduled dates of the fall general meetings are one of the contributing factors for small student turnout. In fact, should the meeting have met quorum, one of the proposals in the agenda was to have such fall meetings scheduled on a different date.
“One of the bylaws that was up to be changed today, was to allow for the meeting to happen in November… when students are a lot freer.”
Some other amendments that were supposed to be discussed and voted on in the general meeting were having general elections take place in January rather than February, changing the VP Internal position name to VP Student Life, and having more clarified descriptions of Feds roles. These amendments, along with others and the presentation of Feds’ annual budget, were instead presented during the informal information session and will be revisited during the March general meeting.
Lolas also mentioned that attendance usually met quorum in the past, when quorum only had a requirement of 50 people.
“We were pretty successful at reaching 50 and we had over 100 here today. So if we had stuck with the lower quorum, we would have had the meeting. But I don’t regret that because I still agree that 50 is not enough to have a general meeting.”
Click here to view the live stream.
