1. February 24, 2016
Gwendolyn Wu
Campus Beat Reporter
Senate Works to Bring Student Voices to the
Association
Senators presented a surge of resolutions and bills at the Wed., Feb. 17
Associated Students Senate meeting in an attempt to better engage
students in the community. The legislation comes in response to
undesirable complacency with policy and the lack of faith that some
populations have in the Association.
On-Campus Senator and second-year political science major Jose Magaña
introduced five bills at the meeting, including A Resolution to Promote

2. Feedback on the Association and A Resolution to Promote a More Inclusive
UCSB Campus. Magaña believes that too many students in the community
have little to no confidence in the Senate and the Association as a whole —
and he is not the only one who believes so. Previously, other senators have
stated that students have no confidence in them. This is problematic due to
the nature of the legislative body as students who are elected to be public
servants for their constituents.
One key issue is accessibility. As Magaña wrote in A Resolution to Promote
Feedback on the Association, “Senate is mandated to participate in
compliance with its governance structure, to which public forum and office
hours are the most well-known ways for the UCSB student population to
bring feedback to the association, which can be very limiting when
considering an average student’s availability, meaning that readily available
feedback is difficult to attain, yet needed in order to ensure all opinions are
accurately documented and addressed.”
The resolution directs the Office of the Internal Vice President to create an
anonymous survey asking students to provide evaluations of the current
senate as a group and as individuals. Some senators are concerned that
this may provide a space for people to make derogatory comments toward
them.
A Resolution to Promote a More Inclusive UCSB Campus works off of
A.S.’s promise to represent all groups on campus while pioneering new
strategies in the realm of student government. Magaña cited studies that
have demonstrated a correlation between gender inclusiveness on campus
and overall student success, again citing that LGBTQ+ populations on
campus are unhappy with the Association. The resolution would ask the
whole campus to download new software to indicate preferred names and
gender pronouns on all campus records, including UCSB Access cards.
Magaña’s work almost perfectly aligns with a last minute resolution
presented by Off-Campus Senator and third-year history of public policy
major Jerel Constantino. A Resolution to Create a Group Project to Create
a Petitioning Service for Associated Students will investigate the possibility
of hosting a website where students can circulate petitions about what they
would like to see changed on campus.

3. Frances Castellon/Staff Photographer
Modeled after the White House’s’ “We the People” website, Constantino
hopes that this system will engage students in a more official way than
arguments via Facebook groups. The petition website would also employ
policy analysts within the Association to examine the feasibility of proposed
changes. At the moment, Constantino hopes to use an open-source
interface that resembles Rochester Institute of Technology’s PawPrints,
which categorizes petitions by subject matter and allows for easy sharing
capabilities on social media.
“Associated Students was established to, and we are elected to, respond to
the calls of the students,” Constantino wrote in an email to The Bottom
Line. “Over the past few years, party politics and a few wedge issues have
gotten in the way of acting on the issues that most students care about. In
my opinion, we should prioritize responding to issues that students actually
care about, and not just discussion from a niche of students who happen to
be the loudest.” All resolutions presented were tabled for a week.
Senate passed A Resolution in Support of Bike Safety, changing the
language so that it did not include anything on the Idaho stop law, which

4. would request that local legislators change laws so that bikers would yield,
rather than stop at stop signs. The motion passed with a vote of 17-0-2.