University of Colorado Boulder student body presidents exercised their rarely-used veto power to kill a bill Wednesday night that could have led fraternities to pay a cheaper rate for use of campus buildings.
The bill had passed the student legislature last Thursday with a vote of 16 in favor, one against and one pass. Despite representatives’ support, Tri-Executives Chris Schaefbauer, Ellie Roberts and Marco Dorado rejected the legislation and ended an at least four-year streak of not using vetoes in CU’s student government.
The bill was stopped from moving toward the Board of Regents because it contradicts the student body’s interests, according to statement released Wednesday from the executives’ office.
“We’ve had threats of them before, but we’ve never had a veto,” said Alexis Scobie, representative at large and co-author of the bill, 79LCB06 called “Shoulder to Shoulder to Regents.”
It would have sped up negotiations between student government and CU administrators to allow fraternities to use some campus buildings at the student rate. Boulder fraternities are currently unaffiliated with the university and pay the non-student rate to hold events and meetings in buildings like the UMC and Rec Center.
“The bill prematurely proposes to bring an issue that has not been fully addressed at the campus-level to the President of the University of Colorado and the Board of Regents,” the executives’ statement says.
Scobie said that students supported the original legislation that was passed last December. The executives, Scobie said, have had opportunities to voice concern over last year’s bill and the latest follow-up since taking office in May.
“They can speak in our meetings, and for them not to speak up and say ‘We’re considering vetoing this bill’ I think is just really terrible, for lack of a better word,” Scobie said.
Will Silkman, candidate for representative at large and co-author of the bill, said the authors and one Tri-Executive planned to meet with Chancellor DiStefano Thursday to discuss the fraternities’ use of campus buildings.
“As far as I know we’re still having the meeting tomorrow, and I would like to still have it,” he said Wednesday evening.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the vetoed bill would have led to fraternities paying a cheaper rate for use of campus buildings when the vetoed bill would have actually led to further conversations with campus administration that could have led to fraternities paying a cheaper rate for use of campus buildings.
Contact CU Independent Managing Editor Alison Noon at Alison.noon@colorado.edu.
So basically the student government does not believe that members of fraternities are not students? that’s cool..
“The bill was stopped from moving toward the Board of Regents because it contradicts the student body’s interests, according to statement released Wednesday from the executives’ office.”
The first sentence of this article contains a glaring error. The bill would *not* have “led fraternities to pay a cheaper rate for use of campus buildings.” The bill would have merely set a deadline for the administration to respond to students who want that to happen and given those students direction on where to next take their concerns after that deadline. The issues with the bill that the author did not cover are that (1) the deadline was unreasonably abrupt, (2) there was no reporting requirement on the negotiations to student government, and (3) student government itself was stripped of the right to extend the deadline and vested that right only with the authors of the bill. As far as good governance for students and good faith negotiations with administration are concerned, the veto was the right thing for the executives to do.