Senate eliminates COO

10/23/08 - In a surprisingly swift, vote the University of Rhode Island Student Senate eliminated the chief operations officer post last night, calling it an unnecessary position. While current COO Josh Feinberg will keep his $2,000-a-year job, the post will disappear when his term ends.

The amendment to the Senate Bylaws dissolving the position and reassigning most of the associated duties to the vice president passed with one "nay" vote and one abstention.

The overwhelming vote came after the senate spent hours last spring debating the merits of keeping the position.

Senator Shane Lee attributed the lack of controversy to weariness with the topic.

"Last year it was kind of fought out, all the battle and the tension of the ideas as far as whether the COO position was useful . and I think we had a lot of people on the sidelines who were sick of it," Lee said.

Lee was a vocal critic of the position last semester and attributed the amendment's easy passage to the high percentage of new senators.

Allen Petit, chairman of the Bylaws Committee that drafted the bill, expressed a similar opinion.

"I feel it's because a lot of the people who really knew more of the root of the issue graduated," Petit said. "As you can see, almost half of the people seated around the table are new senators . and they're not as knowledgeable about past events of senate I guess."

After the meeting Feinberg said, "As the current COO I neither support the bill nor am against the bill. There's a lot of history behind this bill going back to last semester when the bill was voted to the Bylaws committee, that being said I trust their judgment."

"I still think that the COO has great potential, but at this time there's no need for it," he said.

According to the text of the bill passed last night, "The office of the chief operations officer has not been utilized to any degree of effectiveness for its entire period of existence," and "duplicates either on paper or in practice the duties of many other offices."

Petit explained to the senate that the post of COO had originally been to fill the void left by a retiring office assistant.

"Basically the premise of this bill is that at the time the COO position was created, the senate was very different than it is now," Petit said.

As such, the bill states that the COO position is an unnecessary drain on senate finances.

"Even though this semester it seems it has functioned a little better than at other times, I think the conclusion of the senate is that we can still get things done without it," Lee said after the meeting. "We have a duty to the student body, the whole senate, to be more efficient."

As the position stood, the COO served as a voting member of the Executive Committee, acted as liaison between the senate and the senate president, and had the power to appoint or remove members of senate committees except chairpersons and members of the Executive or Rules and Ethics committees, according to the senate Bylaws.

Other duties of the COO included maintaining a degree of oversight over senate committees, and organizing senate orientation, recruitment and social events with the help of the vice president.

The COO's duty to maintain a record of committee meetings has been transferred to the director of communications, who is responsible for disseminating information regarding the senate, including the newly added responsibility to produce a monthly senate newsletter.

In other business:

The senate re-recognized 72 student organizations, including the Sailing Club, the Renaissance Yearbook, the Student Entertainment Committee and the Ghost Hunting Team.

The senate held internal elections to fill seats left open after the general elections. Senior Brandon Brown was elected to the College of Arts and Sciences seat, freshman Yvens Faustin was elected to the at-large seat, sophomore Anthony Sinapi and junior Saiphin Inthisone were elected were elected to the two open off-campus seats, and freshman Gianna Prata won the on-campus seat, the only contested race of the election.

Campus Affairs Committee Chairwoman Amanda LaRocca gave the senate an update on the drinking water situation. The agency responsible for testing the water on campus, BAL labs, has informed the university that a sample taken Monday from the Biological Sciences Center has tested negative for contaminants, and the test should be confirmed by Friday, LaRocca said.