Summer grievance may have reached its end

To censure, impeach or provide no disciplinary action were the options given the Student Government (SG) Senate during Tuesday night’s meeting to address an anonymous grievance about the hiring procedures of the Bulls Radio director filed in June.

Adam Oldfield, chairman of the SG Judiciary and Ethics Committee, presented the committee’s investigation of the hiring procedure to the Senate.

He said the committee found that SG President Cesar Hernandez and former SG Senate President Pro Tempore Chris Randall were in violation of statutes 306.4 and 407.3 when they hired SG members over the summer.

Statute 306.4 states “all applicants will be required to provide a valid job description, position application and personal resume within a minimum of five business days prior to the scheduled interview which shall be submitted to the Senate Pro Tempore,” and statute 407.3 states “all Senators shall be provided with a description of the position for which the candidate is being confirmed for.”

During the course of its investigation, the committee found it necessary to subpoena Hernandez to get a “legitimate” explanation from him about the hiring procedures after the first written statement he gave “was merely a vision statement from SG Vice President Spencer Montgomery regarding Bulls Radio,” Oldfield said.

At no point during the subpoenaed interview did Hernandez “take any sort of responsibility for the actions taken during the hiring process,” the committee found.

Hernandez could not be reached for comment.

The committee decided not to remove Bulls Radio Director Brett Farrar from his position because it would then “have to remove all executive nominees that violated this statute, which is almost all of them to date,” Oldfield said.

“The committee was not able to come to a consensus on any particular course of action (in regards to President Hernandez),” Oldfield said. “So it was decided that any action shall be decided by the Senate as a whole.”

SG Senate President Jennifer Belmont said a senator must file for either censure or impeachment before the case can be heard before the entire Senate.

“A senator will have to file a formal memo citing why they wish to either censure or impeach,” she said.

If no one files a memo, Belmont said, the grievances will likely be left alone and could end up not being filed at all.

“This could likely not get filed because statutes were fixed (when the Senate passed the hiring procedures bill),” she said. “And, because it’s been so long (since it was filed).”

Belmont said if the grievance was pursued, it could cause an “unnecessary war” among SG branches and would “target the president.”

However, Randall attended the meeting and called for a new investigation into the grievance.

“From May to June, I didn’t receive any information on any of the people who were hired (for Student Government),” Randall said. “The nominees are supposed to go through me and they didn’t. Instead, they went through (Belmont).”

Randall said that information did not come until after Farrar was hired and only after he and Belmont met with Hassouneh, former chairman of the Committee on Rules, to have statute 306.4 explained to them.

On the night Farrar was up for confirmation, Randall said he did not know Farrar was going to be on the senate agenda until the rest of the Senate did on the day of the meeting.

“I was kept out of the loop,” he said.

Belmont is the “only person with the power,” he said, to make changes to the Senate orders of the day, and as such, the committee should also question her.

Randall said he wrote an opinion for the committee but was never called to testify on his behalf. He said he wishes he would have elaborated on his statement and shared all of the circumstances surrounding the grievance.