At last night’s AMS Council meeting, the new execs and councillors met for the first time in person to fill committee vacancies and waive a presentation of the 2022/23 preliminary budget.
Here’s what you might have missed.
Nominate, appoint, repeat
Following an hour-and-a-half voting marathon, AMS Council filled all but one committee with the necessary councillor and student-at-large members. The University Ombudsperson Committee is the only committee left with one vacancy.
Before this year, councillors typically approved committee appointments via an email vote. But, new amendments to the Societies Act prevent this kind of voting on appointments, so Council suspended code last night to complete this process in person in order to fill committees ahead of June.
Notably, all the nominees for the Human Resources Committee mentioned a desire to reform the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) position. Previous CEOs have complained about a lack of support from the AMS.
Most of the committee appointments end in September.
Straight to the final
Councillors also voted to suspend code and waive this year’s preliminary budget. Now, only a final budget will be presented in June.
Under AMS code, the preliminary budget must be presented before April 30. But, last year’s Council voted to suspend code to allow for this budget to be presented at the second meeting of this year’s Council — which is set for June 1.
At last night’s meeting, President Eshana Bhangu asked councillors to suspend code again to completely waive the presentation of a preliminary budget this year because a final version of the budget must be presented by June 30.
“It just doesn't make a lot of sense to be presenting a preliminary budget and doing all that work for the preliminary budget for June 1. And then literally 21 days later we're presenting the final budget,” she said.
In place of the preliminary budget, she said that the VP finance and exec will present an “exhaustive and comprehensive” final budget report.