The ASU undergraduate student governments recently passed Senate Bill 31, which is the first step in creating a mandatory $75-per-semester student fee which would be used to fund Sun Devil Athletics. (Photo by Danielle Grobmeier)
ASU’s undergraduate student governments have broken their own bylaws and may have violated Arizona’s open meeting laws by not making documents related to their meetings publicly available.
These include documents related to the newly passed athletic fee, Senate Bill 31, which all five student governments had approved by Oct. 29. The bill’s passage is the first step toward the creation of a mandatory $75-per-semester student fee, which would be used to fund Sun Devil Athletics.
The undergraduate student governments are in varying degrees of violation of their bylaws. Each campus government has its own set with unique stipulations.
None of the governments have clearly accessible meeting agendas on their websites or OrgSync pages. Tempe, Downtown and West all have bylaws that state agendas must be publicly available before meetings — by 9 a.m. the day of the meeting for the Tempe and Downtown campuses and 48 hours before the meeting for the West campus. Polytechnic’s bylaws require “all relevant information about upcoming votes and discussions” be posted 24 hours before senate meetings.
USG Tempe does not maintain a public calendar of meeting dates, times or locations on its webpage or its OrgSync.
The State Press reported on Oct. 16 that USG Tempe had not updated the minutes section of its website since Sept. 25, 2012. That section has since been updated, but only through the Oct. 8 meeting.
USG Tempe has had two regular meetings since Oct. 8. Minutes must be approved at the next meeting before they can be officially posted, but that still leaves USG Tempe one meeting behind. USG Tempe’s bylaws also state that minutes from the last meeting are to be included in the public agenda for the next meeting.
The legislation section of USG Tempe’s website is also outdated. As of Monday, the last bills posted on the site were motions from early September to approve members of USG staff. The page does not provide a copy of SB 31, the Athletic Fee Bill, for students to read.
USG Tempe Senate President Alexis Gonzalez said she puts all bills on the senators’ private Blackboard group and that she will provide any bills to students who email a request for them.
She said she didn’t realize that USG bylaws require the senate secretary to release agendas to the public by 9 a.m. the morning of meeting days.
“It would definitely be our job to put it up on the website,” she said. “... I do take fault for that.”
State Law
Title 38 of the Arizona Revised Statutes regulates public meetings within the state.
A.R.S. 38-431.02 requires 24 hours of “conspicuous” notice to be given of any public meeting. The public body must post the notice to its website and can’t cite technological problems as an excuse for not giving notice. Bodies must also post an agenda 24 hours in advance of the meeting.
A.R.S. 38-431.01 requires minutes to be made available within three working days of a public meeting, and A.R.S. 38-431.05 nullifies any actions taken at meetings in violation of these requirements. Bodies can ratify those actions within 30 days of the violation’s discovery and would have to give 72 hours advance notice of the new meeting.
The Arizona Board of Regents, which oversees the state universities, is held to A.R.S. 38 as a public body. ABOR Policy 5-202 states that while the Board does not have approval power over associated students’ constitutions, it can submit the associations to review and has veto power over their actions. It also establishes that student governments are not separate legal entities from their universities.
ABOR and ASU administrators declined to comment on SB 31 while it is still in the proposal stage.
David Bodney, an adjunct professor of law at Sandra Day O’Connor Law School and the managing partner for Steptoe & Johnson’s Phoenix offices, said determining whether student governments are subject to Arizona’s open meeting laws is a matter of deciding whether they are a public body.
As of yet, there is no case history to definitively classify student governments as public bodies, he said.
However, Arizona is clearly a state that favors open meetings, Bodney said.
“There’s a strong presumption in favor of open and public meetings in Arizona,” he said.
He said it is a matter of sound public policy to provide agendas and meeting notices.
Without a case example, it comes down to interpreting whether student governments should be following Arizona’s open meeting laws, but it makes “perfect sense” for them to do so, he said.
“As a matter of public policy, it only makes sense for student governments to hold open and public meetings,” Bodney said. “I think the open meetings law is broad enough to encompass student governments.”
Student Government at UA
Associated Students of the University of Arizona’s constitution requires that its senate follow Arizona’s open meeting laws.
However, ASUA’s senate site hasn’t posted minutes or an agenda since Oct. 22.
ASUA President Morgan Abraham said the senate likes to conduct a full referendum when it proposes new fees.
He said this is more of a preferred than a mandated procedure that ends with students voting on the measure.
When the measures come from the executive board, as ASU’s SB 31 did, the procedure is different, Abraham said.
Instead of a referendum, the outreach team will create focus groups and hold open forums, he said.
Abraham said ASUA struggles to reach all 30,000 of UA’s students, so it likes to get students as involved in the process as possible.
He said he likes the involvement that comes with a vote, though voter turnout at UA only ranges from 10 to 25 percent.
“We’re definitely able to hit some cliques on campus better than others,” he said. “That’s why we like to open it up to a formal election where people who are more opinionated on the issue can let their voice be heard.”
USG's Efforts at Communication
USG Tempe Senator Devon Mills said USG did all it could to reach out to students, adding that is inaccurate to say USG didn’t try to involve students.
“It’s a very extreme assumption to say that,” he said.
USG reached out to college councils, held town halls and launched a social media campaign, he said.
No emails were sent out because there is a long request process involved to send a mass email to the student body, he said.
USG tried to have individual colleges notify their listservs, but administration blocked them, Mills said.
“They shut out email from us,” he said.
University spokeswoman Julie Newberg said requests for mass emails to students must go through the provost’s office and that on average, only one is sent every semester.
Mills said he sent two emails to the listserv of club leaders, which he does have access to, and only received one response.
That response never went beyond an email exchange, he said.
“It’s easy to say we’re not reaching out to all the students,” he said. “Reaching out to them is like reaching out to a small town. ... We do everything in our power to reach out to students.”
Tempe Undergraduate President Jordan Davis said in addition to holding town halls, talking to college councils and running a social media campaign, the government reached out to the representative “Big Five” student organizations for feedback.
The Big Five are the Programming and Activities Board, Residence Hall Association, Greek Life, Student Alumni Association and Associated Students of ASU.
The only group that didn’t fully support the bill was Tempe’s RHA, he said.
“We did it as transparently as we possibly could,” he said.
Davis ran on a platform of keeping fees and tuition low for students.
He said he thought his administration has kept that promise, adding that a $150 per year fee is less than the usual tuition increase of 3 percent, or approximately $500.
Initial news of the bill focused more on the fee than the positive aspects that will come from the resulting tuition reinvestment, Davis said.
“All (students) heard from reporters was ‘fee,’ and that’s a dirty word,” he said. “I would never push for something like this if I honestly didn’t believe at my core that it would help students.”
PAB President Zac Donohoe said the diversity of PAB’s members, which include graduate and international students as well students of many major affiliations, makes it adequately representative of the student body.
He said Davis came to him a few weeks before the bill went public to PAB’s thoughts and approval.
“They’ve been pretty transparent through the whole process,” he said. “Which is good. I think that’s what they needed to do when one of their big points for the bill is transparency.”
Donohoe said even PAB faces problems communicating with students.
“I think (USG) did all they could have without spending a ton of money,” he said. “You can engage the students, but it ultimately boils down to whether or not they want to come.”
Short Timelines
Alexis Kramer-Ainza, a Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication senator at the Downtown campus, said she supports the fee but would have liked more time to get feedback from constituents.
Kramer-Ainza withheld her vote when USG Downtown passed the bill, she said.
She said she worries about the financial burden of the fee.
“I don’t want it to be a sacrifice for students to pay that,” Kramer-Ainza said. “We’re not going to please everyone, but I would at least liked to have gotten more feedback than what was given to us on such a short timeline.”
Katherine Lee, president of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences College Council, said opinion over the bill was split when CLASCC heard about it from its senators. It seemed abrupt and sudden, she said.
“It was definitely a surprise that this bill was coming forth,” she said.
Lee said the fee didn’t seem fair after students were told tuition wouldn’t rise and that the promised benefits seem hard to follow through on, adding that better ways, such as private donors, might have been found to fund Sun Devil Athletics.
Sun Devil Athletics ran a deficit of $5.8 million dollars in 2012, despite receiving a subsidy of $10.3 million from the University, according to a report from USA Today.
The Arizona Republic reported last August that the subsidy comes from the portion of ASU’s operating budget that is not taxpayer-funded — in other words, from tuition and grants.
The Republic reported Friday that Sun Devil Athletics made a profit of $73,764 for fiscal year 2013.
Lee said similar measures used to take weeks or months to move through the senate, but this bill seemed to pass quickly.
While college councils are liaisons between students and senators, senators still need to reach out to constituents, because they have the most information about policy, Lee said.
She said the council’s opinion was still split over the bill when it was voted on, and at this point, it is hard to say if the bill will be good or bad.
“I am very anxious to see what they actually will do with it,” Lee said. “I don’t think it should have to fall on the students to bail out the athletics system.”
Reach the reporter at ammedeir@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @amy_medeiros
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of the fee in one instance. It has been updated.
