Number of senators stays the same

assistant-news@dailylobo.com
@ChloeHenson5

A proposed Associated Students of the University of New Mexico constitutional amendment to expand the number of senators from 20 to 24 failed to pass Wednesday night.

ASUNM Sen. Earl Shank, who co-wrote Amendment One, said the amendment aimed to increase representation for students.

“The underlying thing is we wanted to increase representation for all groups of students in the senate,” he said. “We saw that easily, certain segments of the population of students at the University are potentially overrepresented, and others aren’t.”
ASUNM Vice President Brandon Meyers said he co-wrote the bill because of concerns that the senate did not effectively represent students.

“We pretty much hear across the board that we aren’t reaching out to our students effectively, that we’re not doing effective outreach, that it’s always the same people who are in student government,” he said. “It just seems that no matter what we’ve done in the past, it wasn’t working.”

Shank said he and Meyers wanted to increase the number of senators to 24 because it would be difficult to measure the effects of just one additional senator each semester. He said 24 senators would have also divided evenly into ASUNM’s three standing committees and eight executive agencies.

The other proposed change that failed to pass was Amendment Four, which would have changed all gender-specific pronouns in the constitution to gender-neutral pronouns.

However, the other two amendments on the ballot passed.

Amendment Two, which requires ASUNM senators to maintain a 2.5 GPA, carry six credit hours and stay off of University probation throughout their tenures at UNM, got two thirds of the total student votes and passed.

So did Amendment Three, which will transfer composition requirements of the ASUNM Elections Commission from the constitution to the ASUNM Lawbook.