The 2016 AMS AGM: What happened that wasn’t on the agenda?

Samantha McCabe
author
Published on Nov. 1, 2016

This year’s AMS Annual General Meeting (AGM) featured a lot of student questions and suggestions, a quick spiel of the motions on the agenda and no reaching of quorum. We live-tweeted the entire meeting @UbysseyNews and live-streamed it on Facebook, but here’s a breakdown of something different — the topics that got brought up that weren’t necessarily on the agenda.

While attendees were anxiously waiting for their pizza, the five AMS execs, as well as managing director Keith Hester and student services manager Hussam Zbeeb, fielded questions from students and topics organically came up throughout the meeting based on student interests

Ava Nasiri, the AMS president, brought up the idea to mixed responses from students. The bus would start at Commercial-Broadway and then stop once before reaching UBC, costing interested students $10 a month. The crowd was generally enthusiastic to the idea of the AMS paying closer attention to students’ commuter needs but were unsure that the idea would actually work, citing concerns of long wait times rendering the system useless. Another student mentioned that in their opinion, the cost would likely outweigh the benefit, both to students and to the AMS.

Chris Scott, the AMS VP Administration, mentioned in his executive speech — each AMS executive gave a quick speech on their topics of focus this year — that renovations of the Old SUB are still underway.

Scott has mentioned before that this space would likely serve as overflow for some of the many clubs that the Nest houses.

Zbeeb also mentioned some interesting side projects that he has in the works, including a potential student feedback session or review on the services that AMS offers. Those services include SafeWalk, the Sexual Assault Support Centre and the Food Bank, among others.

Zbeeb also mentioned the possibility of starting a resource for students wanting assistance with starting their own businesses in collaboration with some of Sauder’s resources. He was not sure what it would look like yet, but identified it as a clear gap in Student Services.

After a quick speech from Hester on how the AMS's food services and restaurants did financially last year (TL;DR — badly), a student noted that especially since Lowercase was shut down, the line at Uppercase in the Nest is extremely long at most times. The student noted that this was especially inconvenient when most students simply are looking for a simple drip coffee.

When the fifth motion came up — regarding the re-implementation of “Toonie Tuesdays,” or $2 beers — some students had concerns and it was a topic of a lot of brainstorming. In particular, students brought up that it would take away from the fact that Wednesdays are the campus “drinking night” and also discussing that it might be better to promote them as the old karaoke Tuesdays instead of encouraging drinking as the main event.

To round out the end of the meeting, Nasiri commented that perhaps the AMS should hold more meetings to get more student feedback.