New recommendations proposed by the AMS Council intend to address issues within AMS Events and improve accountability and oversight of the department going forward.
On April 28, AMS President Cole Evans presented the report of the AMS ad hoc Events and Audit Committee to Council, intended to resolve issues of accountability and oversight with AMS Events. This report comes almost six months after AMS Events was scrutinized for hosting a Halloween Pub Crawl event amid the second wave of COVID-19 — an event that the execs (save one) said they didn't know was happening.
Evans blamed the delay on internal issues, but refused to comment on the details for confidentiality reasons.
“The committee was delayed ... meeting because we had some things to resolve internally before the committee could meet and start discussing some of the more structural concerns,” Evans said.
Green proposals are things the committee have made recommendations or motions on. Yellow proposals are on things being worked on somewhere else, or will be worked on in the future.
— Ubyssey News (@UbysseyNews) April 29, 2021
The recommendations: pic.twitter.com/K0s7vJS0oe
The report consists of 11 proposals to address issues in areas such as student oversight, accountability, risk management, communication, and accessibility and diversity of content.
Evans stressed that internal changes should address the issues of oversight and accountability.
“We have made some changes to our expectations of our permanent staff and also there is a better understanding of what are the desires of the Council and the executives in regards to progress moving forward,” Evans said of the changes already made concerning AMS Events.
“A lot of discussions we have had in the ad hoc committee have got[ten] the ball rolling on items that will hopefully prevent any future things like what happened last October from happening again.”
The report proposes the development of risk and safety guidelines for the events department, in addition to the conventional health and safety plans already in place for major AMS events.
“This work will be done by the new ad hoc committee that has been formed, which is the ad hoc committee on [AMS Events] Principles and Ethics, led by the vice-president administration ... [They] will probably meet in a few weeks time to start the work on creating that document which will hopefully serve as a guide for the departments moving forward,” Evans said.
“This is a bit more involved work, so we have had to extend the timeline on that a little bit but we are hoping to have that wrapped up by the end of this calendar year.”
However, regarding the move to in-person classes in the fall, the work of the events department is still primarily going to be dictated by what the provincial health guidelines look like.
“There is a lot of excitement that we might be able to do more events that feel more like normal but again we have to wait and see what the public health situation looks like in the fall,” Evans said.