Erik Paulson's Blog

The new semester starts in a few days. This past fall, some members have privately grumbled that they didn’t like that I showed up with ideas out of nowhere, and that they wished they I had let more people know ahead of time what I was thinking. Fair enough.

During meetings, I’ve made repeated mention of my ASM to-do list. Rather than just picking things off it each meeting and showing up with them, I’ll lay out what’s left on my list for the spring.

Over break, every ASM chair had to create a similar list of committee goals for the spring semester. Hopefully those lists/reports will all be made public soon. It’d be nice if the other ASM council members put something together as well, and got it out to the public. I don’t care how they do it – starting or using their own blog, a ton of Twitter updates, a Facebook note, a letter to the editor in either Herald or Cardinal, or just get Ken to post it on the ASM blog, whatever. Whatever you do, just don’t send it as an email only to the rest of ASM. That doesn’t help anyone.

So, here’s what I want to do this semester. It’s not super-ambitious; graduation is more of a priority for me than ASM. My goal is to finish things before 17th session takes over, or leave things with such a neatly-wrapped bow that 17th session doesn’t have much of an excuse for not doing something.

Of course, if something comes up, I reserve the right to add to this list during the semester. I apologize for the all of the jargon, but these are all outlines of what I want to do, not final descriptions of specific proposals.

To make it readable, I’ve broken it up into five different posts.

Funding issues – Tenant Services RFP, Creative Works fund, Centers funding stream, Print Media funding stream

Action items – Housing Fair, Graduate Student Town Halls

ASM jobs – ASM Foundation, Webmaster job, Chief of Staff, eliminate ASM Secretary

Bylaws and Constitutional Changes – United Council amendment, Term start date amendment, Stipend acceptance bylaw, First Meeting agenda bylaws, Vacant seat bylaws, overall scrubbing of bylaws

ASM Organizational efficiency – Integration of Shared Gov appointees, Consent Agenda, Data and Documents availability, Streaming broadcast of Council meetings, delegation meetings with Deans, and inviting the Chancellor to council meetings.

[This is part of my series of ASM goals for Spring Semester. Read them all here]

We need to think a little bit harder about how to integrate the Shared Gov appointees with the rest of ASM and campus. This does not mean we use Shared Gov appointees as policy tools by trying to tell them how to vote – instead, they should be resources. We need to keep in mind that the Shared Gov appointees work for campus and their committees, not for ASM, and putting too many burdens on the appointees isn’t likely to get us anywhere. I don’t have any great ideas here, it’s just something that could be better. (Off the top of my head, have a shared gov meeting where all the appointees break up into their clusters, then get Council/Leg Affairs/AcAffairs/Diversity to all attend that afternoon and just meet the appointees?)

It’s not a super-high priority for me, and I may not actually do anything with it this semester, but I would love to sign on with someone else bringing something forward.

I’d like to operate meetings under a “consent agenda”, to save time. This is real simple – in one quick vote, we get all the non-controversial stuff out of the way with no discussion and no waste of time. It could cut an hour or more off of council meetings, which god knows everyone would appreciate.

We need to do a better job of getting documents and data out and available. It’s embarrassing that none of our minutes are posted. The archives of the student council email list server, and the coordinating council list server should be easily online. ASM should stop using “the server”, and instead access more data through the ASM website. There’s no better way to ensure the public has full transparent access than to insist ASM uses the same process to access documents as everyone else – to eat our own dogfood, as the saying goes.

We should stream our meetings online. Even if it’s crappy, it’s better than nothing. $99 buys us Adobe Connect. We stick a couple of microphones around the table, and it’s probably not too bad. (Even better would be talking WSUM into steaming the meeting for us, since they’re on the other side of the wall)

We should insist that all delegations meet with their Deans at least once a semester. This just seems like a no-brainer.

We should also get the Chancellor and Dean of Students to come to a meeting or two a semester, as a regular event, just to give us an update and to give council members  a chance to ask them questions.

[This is part of my series of ASM goals for Spring Semester. Read them all here]

Move the United Council (UC) relationship out of the ASM constitution and into the ASM bylaws. Let me be clear right off the bat: I’m not proposing changing anything with UC. Everything, from a day-to-day standpoint, will be exactly the same. We would mirror the constitutional language right in the bylaws. Changing the constitution requires an item on the spring ballot.

Right now, ASM council members are required to attend a UC event per semester. That’s fine by me. I’m indifferent to United Council. It’s got some good people, but I don’t think it’s a very useful ally in anything ASM wants to get done.

I have serious doubts about the future of United Council, and at some point after I’m long since done with ASM, the inflexibility of having the UC requirement be constitutionally defined could be a problem. For example:

a)    UW Madison could pull out of United Council. With no organized opposition, and a campaign for it, UC barely won a Yes vote with only 53% to 47% 51.8% to 48.2% the last time around. I hope they don’t do this, but since conservatives on this campus hate UC, never get a real victory on campus or have any real ideas, and seem content to be the Party of No, it does seem like a well-organized conservative effort to defeat UC in 2011 would succeed. That would be a problem for ASM, which by its constitution has to participate in United Council. If the relationship were in the bylaws, if Madison pulled out, ASM could amend its bylaws quickly to reflect the new relationship.

b)   The bigger problem is what happens if UC folds or changes into something else? Most of the other 4-year schools have pulled out, leaving most of the two-years and UW-Madison and a handful of other 4-years (UWEC, Stevens Point, and Parkside). If they lose a few more schools they’re going to have a real problem keeping everything going. If UC folds, then the ASM Constitution says “ASM most participate in an organization that doesn’t exist.”

The time to fix your roof is on a sunny day. I think UC and ASM is going to be a problem down the road, so let’s fix that problem now before it rains. And again, from a practical standpoint, everything continues to work the same way as before.

Fixing the bigger problems with UC is not a high priority for me, but I support other people working on it and would obviously like to see it work better. Some UC thoughts:

A)   ASM needs to figure out what it wants from UC, and clearly explain that to campus, if we want to spend any time with UC. This is complicated by the fact that UC doesn’t report to ASM, instead UC is responsible to UW-Madison students directly.

B)   ASM needs to figure out how to disagree with UC without pissing everyone off. The geographical regent representation bill was a terrible bill and it’s good that it was vetoed, but it was a priority for UC. ASM just sort of threw up its arms and let UC go for it anyway.

C)   UC needs to raise its fee. It’s been $2 for far too long (7 years?), and $2 doesn’t go as far as it used to. What they really should do is get permission from the Regents to increase it at 50% of base tuition percentage increases per year automatically.

D)   The maximum time between referenda should be extended, to at least 3 years, but 4 would be better. Right now, campuses have to revote every at least every two years on if they should stay UC member campuses, which means UC staff is spending a lot of time on the road assisting “Vote Yes” campaigns. That’s a total waste of time that could be better spent working on actual student issues. Every 4 years is plenty good, and if a campus got all hot and bothered it could call an early referendum at any time, just like they can now.

E)   Long term, what is the relationship between UC and Student Reps, which is the organization of UW Student Government presidents? This is an uncomfortable question.

F)    This is probably an incredible non-starter, but if too many schools pull out of UC and UC is in danger of folding, ASM should look for ways to directly assist UC – in particular, use some of our staff to help organize UC, or incorporate UC staff into ASM. (Some would probably call this ASM taking over UC, and that’s probably not that far off from the truth. It’s got some advantages – UC money is MRF money – Mandatory Refundable Fee money, which can do some things that seg fees can’t.)

Pass an amendment simplifying the student council term language in the ASM constitution. When we worked on fixing Freshman representation in August, we had a huge fight – not because people didn’t want to fix the Freshman eligibility problem, but because people wanted to fix more than just Freshmen. For example, it probably makes sense for most of the professional schools to elect their representatives in the fall, and to give transfer students the opportunity to run and vote in the fall as well. However, we’re stuck with the current language in the constitution, which says everything is elected in the spring, except the Freshmen.

The debate we had in August was very passionate, and a lot of people swore that we’d return to the issue and do something for transfer students and new graduate and professional students, but so far nothing has happened. I’m not sure why this is.

I don’t know what the right election process should be. We struggled with it on the ASM constitution committee last year, and in the end didn’t come up with anything better, and decided just to punt to the future, and fix it in the bylaws. However, with the current ASM constitution, we can’t fix it in bylaws.

So, I think the right approach is to punt again, but to give the 17th session the flexibility to come up with a better fix. What I want the 16th session to do is to ask the student body to approve an amendment, to make the constitution read:

“Student Council representatives shall serve for one year. No person may serve more than two full terms as a SC representative. Terms for representatives elected on a spring ballot shall start May 1. Terms for representatives elected on a fall ballot shall start November 1.

The student council may, with three/fourths vote, shift the election of a seat to a spring or fall ballot. In such a case the term may expire before one year has passed, but in no case shall a term be extended past one year”

That’s it. We’ll also immediately put the current setup (everyone starts in the spring except the freshmen, who start in the fall) into the bylaws. Then, once the amendment takes effect, next year the council can twiddle with moving more seats to the fall. However, anything the move to the next election will have to be immediately reelected – for example, if you move the law seat from the spring into the fall, no one’s term runs for 18 months while they wait for the next election. All that could happen is a term could be shortened. It takes a 3/4ths majority to move a seat around, because it has to be a damn good idea to move a seat, and it shouldn’t be used as a way to get rid of a representative the council doesn’t like.

There should be an explicit bylaw that allows a position to decline some or all of a stipend. Right now, effectively no grad student can serve in a paid position because it will force them to give up their RA/TA/PAship. The combination of the ASM job and their assistantship would push them over a 75% time appointment, which the University won’t allow. This isn’t a question of can a grad student find the time to put in the hours – some can, some can’t. The problem is that they can’t do them all on the UW’s dime.

We need to fix the bylaws the explicitly set the agenda for the first meeting. For two years in a row, ASM has had trouble electing a chair at the first meeting, so the bylaws should be fixed to deal with this possibility – the Vice Chair, if elected, should be able to take over the meeting.

We need to clarify, in the bylaws, how to declare a seat vacant. This may seem obvious, but it’s not. That’s why we still haven’t filled the special student ASM seat – the SEC should have declared a winner for that seat but never did. We need protection from a small majority being able to declare an opponent’s seat vacant, probably with some way for council to override the chair.  I don’t think it’s that complicated of a bylaw change to get right.

We should give a good scrubbing to the bylaws, and delete crap we don’t use, like the Foundation Hiring Committee, and fix the numbering and awkward language. This is a big pain of a project and it’s probably not going to get done, but it’s needed.

[This is part of my series of ASM goals for Spring Semester. Read them all here]

We need to figure out the ASM Foundation, and what the heck is going on with it. We haven’t appointed anyone to it because we don’t know what the ASM Foundation wants to do, so we don’t know what we should be looking for in an appointee.

The ASM Webmaster job is a disaster. For the spring, we need to increase the hours and pay rate. We may have money in the budget that we didn’t spend on the press office in the fall, or we may want to eliminate one of the open press office seats and split the money between the remaining press office position and the webmaster.

While the next webmaster has a lot of fires to put out that the Brett just didn’t have time to resolve, the main goal for the webmaster this semester should be to prepare for the next webmaster in the fall – which we’ve put a lot of money aside for, with the idea that it will almost be a PA. What the webmaster should do this spring is inventory our data and how to start training the rest of ASM in getting information out on to the web.

It’d be nice to make the webmaster in the fall an actual PA – I’m trying to find out who told us we can’t have a PA on ASM funds. UW System never intended F-50 to mean that you can’t hire a PA because their contract includes tuition remission. If that’s ASM Staff’s interpretation, they’re wrong. If that’s the Vice Chancellor office’s interpretation, well, they’re wrong too, but that’s a harder fight. In that case, the easier approach would be to work out a deal with ODOS, where ODOS hires the webmaster PA and ASM takes over something else. It’s doable. I’ve written about what the position should before.

We need to define the “Chief of Staff” role, starting with a new name. (Chief of Staff is a punchline.) We desperately need more help at the Chair/Vice Chair level – someone who can work at that same level of authority, but that doesn’t have a specific area to worry about, like the current committee chairs. I know some people are convinced that this is some secret plot to backdoor in an ASM president, but the problem isn’t that we don’t have a President, it’s that there’s too much to do for two people, if they’re the Chair and Vice-Chair or President and Vice-President. We need to add a third.

I’d like to eliminate the ASM secretary position, and shift its duties to a combination of the professional staff, the webmaster, the chief of staff, and some ASM hourly staff. It’s crazy that we burn a representative on this job.

[This is part of my series of ASM goals for Spring Semester. Read them all here]

Have a workable plan for the Housing Fair finished. It sounds like there’s some interest in the rest of council on for this, which should mean we can get a lot of it worked out this spring, and passed on to the 17th session.

Host a Grad Student Townhall or two. They may be general-purpose, or maybe we’ll hold some townhalls on specific issues.

We’ve got the RA Unionization issue still out there. Nothing happened in the fall because the State is still writing the rules, but those will be done in the next month or two. This is going to be a bigger issue next year, when any RA organizing committees get started, but that part won’t involve ASM. What ASM can and should do this spring is to help to get facts out about the process, and to help shape those processes.

What’s happening right now with RA unionization is the State, through the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, is drafting rules for how the process of union recognition will work.  State law laid out the broad outline of how it will work, ie it will be “card-check”, but WERC is now responsible for putting together the exact details of things like “when can authorization cards start being collected”, “what does an organization have to do to be recognized as a group collecting cards”, etc. WERC will have a first draft of those rules done in late February, and then will hold public hearings on the draft. WERC is at least open to the possibility of holding hearings on campus, and organizing that is something ASM could do. Alternatively, ASM could collect feedback and pass it on to WERC through a general townhall.

Another topic that we may want to have a grad student town hall to talk about the grad school reorg, especially after the Faculty Senate/University Committee weighs in with their report. I didn’t push for ASM to do anything with the grad school reorg this past fall, and in fact counseled against it, because I thought there was too much hysteria around the whole thing. It was obvious that it wasn’t well-defined and needed more work, and the process was going to slow down. I thought the Faculty Senate resolution was unnecessary and hurt more than it helped. Similarly, I thought the best thing ASM could do last semester was to stay out of it.

That doesn’t mean that ASM shouldn’t keep track of what’s going on, and to be sure we need to watch carefully in the next few weeks. The report commissioned by the University Committee is expected by February 1st. After that’s out, I expect to see a firmer plan from the administration and cooler heads, and that’s a better time for ASM to get involved.

[This is part of my series of ASM goals for Spring Semester. Read them all here]

Finish the Housing/Tenant Services RFP. I’ve written about this a lot already, so I won’t go into it in much detail. My goal is to have it out to the Dept of Administration before the end of April. It’s going to take a ton of bureaucracy navigation with the UW to get it happen.

Finish the guidelines for the Creative Works fund and get them approved with the Finance Committee. My plan is to write a first draft, and then kick it to Finance and let them polish.

ASM should continue to diversify its funding streams. This is something Alex Gallagher wrote about last spring in a post that everyone should read twice. In particular, I want to bring his “Centers funding stream” to life. Here’s what he wrote:

“Centers: CWC, LGBTCC (when it was a group), Wunk Sheek, MEChA, and WCSU look similar in that they provide safe space and programming around issues of underrepresented minorities.  I think that you could capitalize on this similarity and create a stream which could provide funding for their unique needs.  Rather than pretending that they look like GUTS or ALPS, this will allow them to be treated like centers.  You can use the exact same budgets as you do for GSSF groups, if you want, but you can change the criteria to fit these particular types of services.”

We’d create it this funding stream this spring, with applications starting in Fall of 2010, for funding to start in July of 2011. It will actually probably save money, because right now in order to be a GSSF group you actually have to provide services. With a centers fund, groups wouldn’t have to screw around with that and could focus on their center aspect, which means they can ask for less money. To keep the growth from going crazy, maybe we cap the total fund, but that’s tricky to do in a viewpoint-neutral fashion.

I don’t know that we’ll get this done this year

In another funding stream, it’s time to think about the future of newspapers. UW System policy allows for seg fees to pay for newspapers, but currently the GSSF explicitly disallows publications as a service.

Now, both the Daily Cardinal and the Badger Herald swear up and down that they’d never take a dime of money from ASM, but I’d rather design a system when they don’t need the money, so if the day comes that they do really need the money they can decide how important it really is to not take ASM money. Broadly, here’s what I’m thinking:

- ASM won’t fund the entire costs. We’d fund maybe 50%, with a cap of say $200,000, and a minimum of $25,000 (which means that a paper has to be able to raise at least $25000 before we’ll take them serious).

- You have to be a real paper. Published at least once a week during the semester, some print minimum (5000 copies?). I’d like to put some minimum, like 25% news coverage, but that’s probably too tricky to get right.

- You have to print. Online only is the wave of the future and all that, and we should eventually think about how to fund online only, but for now an online-only org could get started for much cheaper than a print version – probably cheap enough that it doesn’t need any assistance.

- We need to protect editorial control. Student papers risk enough criticizing the administration, which controls their grades. It’d be even harder to serve as the watchdog for student government knowing that the student government also controls your funding. I think a newspaper would still probably apply to the SSFC, but there would also be a review by a committee of outsiders, from the journalism world (hopefully we could draft some faculty from the J-School, and the local press) to review any denials of funding, looking to ensure it wasn’t because the paper criticized the student government.

- The students and university should get something out of the deal, too. If you take ASM money, the UW should get a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide license to all of the content of the paper that allows them to store the archives and display it in any form for any and all comers.  (Maybe only what’s published while under the deal, but it’d be nice to have the complete archives of the papers that go back for decades.)

In full disclosure, it’s no secret that I write for the Badger Herald, though it is not a paid gig.  I hope to graduate before this funding became available, but even so we’d put in some language that said anyone who votes for the creation of this funding stream can’t be a regular contributor to a publication receiving funding.

The newspaper fund isn’t likely to get done this year, but I wanted to at least ask the SSFC to think about it.

[This is cross-posted to Muckrakers. Comments are off here]

Wisconsin has a strong open meetings law that aims to ensure public participation. It’s always been unclear if the law covers student governments, so a recent Attorney General opinion was welcome news. The AG’s opinion was that so long as the student government was carrying out its duties under state law, they should follow the open meetings law.

This is somewhat moot at UW-Madison for ASM. Under the ASM bylaws, which were written long before the AG’s opinion was issued, ASM has to follow the state open meetings law. Unfortunately, ASM has been a bit sloppy.

One of the great things about the WI Open Meetings law is that anyone can ask for clarification. Two situations in ASM bothered me enough to take the AG up on that option, and so in November I wrote asking for clarification. I got back a written response the other day. You can see my questions here, and read a PDF of the AG’s written response here. I’ll summarize briefly my two questions and the answer.

The first question was over timing of agenda notifications. The agenda needs to be posted no later than 24 hours before a meeting. On November 10th, I stopped by the ASM offices at exactly 6:30, saw the agenda, and noted something important had been left off. A corrected agenda was posted at 6:45. At the meeting on the 11th, there was a conscious effort to foot-drag to make sure the meeting did not start until 6:45. (To be fair, at that point in the semester, people were harried, and it’s possible the meeting would not have started until 6:45 anyway).

My question to the AG was: is this legal? The AG laid out a pretty clear guideline: it depends on what the effect it would have on members of the public. If it only caused people to arrive for the meeting 15 minutes early, then there wasn’t really any harm done. However, and the situation that I was concerned with, was what if it caused people NOT to attend a meeting. Here’s how it could happen.

The agenda needs to provide people with a reasonable idea of what will and will not be discussed and acted on at a meeting. The ASM agenda evolves over time – if you ask the ASM chair 3 days before a meeting what will be discussed he or she will have a pretty good idea, but things come up that add or remove agenda items. If you look at an agenda on Sunday, it may be different than the agenda on Monday. The 24 hours rule gives a clear safe harbor for checking the agenda: if it is not on the agenda on 6:30pm on Tuesday, then it will not be discussed on Wednesday night at the meeting. There is no need to check any earlier or later (though, it never hurts to look early). It is possible that by changing the agenda after 6:30pm, someone looked at the agenda as it was posted at 6:30, saw that their issue wasn’t on the agenda, and decided not to come to the meeting, even it was later added to the agenda.

Now, at the November 11th meeting, am I worried that this was an issue? No, not really. First, the actual agenda item was pretty inconsequential – to be honest I don’t even remember what it was (I think it was some internal appointments to a committee that had no objections.) Second, no one comes and looks at our agendas, and even if they do, the window of vulnerability was only 15 minutes in this instance. (Though, ASM has gone longer delaying the start of a meeting – at the July meeting, the meeting didn’t start until about an hour after the scheduled start, because there wasn’t quorum.) The true value of this incident, and the AG’s opinion, is the clear emphasis on the consideration of “reasonable burden” that ASM can expect to place on a member of the public when providing notice of a meeting and the meeting’s content. It is not likely that ASM placed an unreasonable burden on anyone by delaying the meeting on November 11th.

That idea of reasonableness went right into my next question. ASM, like most governmental bodies, considers the meeting officially noticed when physical copies of the agenda are placed in a designated spot. Government bodies generally post them electronically as well, but the canonical document is the physical version, so you don’t have to own or be able to use a computer to access the notice. (For every hypothetical you can come up with on why an electronic version is better, I can come up with a problem why electronic versions are more dangerous, so let’s not have that argument today. We should do both, but the official notice should be the physical copy.) When ASM physically posts an agenda, it places the whole packet on a shelf outside the ASM office. The top page or two is the agenda, and the next 15 to 20 (or more) pages are supporting material.

What has been long-standing tradition in ASM is to get the agenda and packet posted a couple of hours, if not days, before the 24-hour deadline. The ASM Chair, Vice-Chair, or Secretary are the only ones who usually print the agenda. However, it’s fairly routine that should have been on the agenda don’t make it, either because of a mistake or just not getting it done as fast as it was needed. In this case, the practice has been for the council member or committee chair to just put all of the materials under the stack, but not reprint the agenda. (This is all done before the 24-hour deadline has arrived.) At the actual meeting, a motion is made to just amend the agenda to add the item. ASM has considered the item “noticed” because it was present in the stack of paper that is provided for the public. The assumption has been that any member of the public who wants to know what will be in the meeting will read the entire packet, not just the agenda on the top of the stack.

I have objected to this at every meeting it has been attempted, and have usually prevailed. I never felt that it is reasonable to ask the public to read through the entire stack, and hope that they can figure out the ASM jargon in the supporting material and figure out what will actually happen at the meeting. I’m pleased that the AG’s office agrees with me, and I hope this convinces the rest of the council that getting agenda material on time is important.

I think everyone in ASM recognizes that that there is work to be done on keeping the public informed. Unfortunately, most of that thinking is on reporting afterwards, and not informing ahead of time. Putting a piece of paper on a shelf may be the legal minimum, but no one could, with a straight face, justify it as doing enough to actually notify the public.

[This was only ever an email, but it my next post makes no sense without it. I got an answer back today, I'll get that up next.]

Hello Kevin -

First, this message might be aimed too far up the organizational chain at the DOJ. It wasn’t clear to me from the SPAR webpage (http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dls/spar.asp ) who the best contact person would be, and you were the only person listed.

I’m CCing Nancy Lynch, senior University Legal Counsel at UW-Madison. I haven’t discussed this with her and it’s the first she’s hearing of it. I don’t expect this message to be a big deal, but just in case I wanted her to have a heads-up.

I’m a member of the UW Madison Student Government. I understand that there’s some ambiguity as to whether or not the Open Meetings and Open Records laws apply to us, and that there’s currently a request, from the UW-Milwaukee student newspapers, for an advisory opinion in the AG’s office as to that very question. Additionally, there’s proposed legislation from Rep. Gottlieb that would explicitly require student governments to comply with open meetings and records law.

At Madison, this is all somewhat moot – our bylaws explicitly state that we will comply with the state’s open meetings law, and as much as possible we have directly incorporated those requirements into our bylaws.

I have two specific situations where I would like your office’s opinion. One I believe is a clearcut question, and the other is more a question of what is “reasonable”.

The first question has to do with the definition of “24 hours” and meeting start time as listed in the public notice. If a meeting is scheduled, and announced, to start at 6:30pm on Wednesday, but a substitute agenda is posted at say 6:45pm on Tuesday, still listing the start time as 6:30pm on Wednesday, has the “24 hours” requirement been met if the meeting is not actually called to order until 6:45pm on Wednesday? The public, of course, had no way of knowing that the meeting would be delayed 15 minutes or however long we needed to get back to the 24-hours safe harbor. More importantly, the public would also have no idea that the agenda could be changed after the T-minus-24 hours time of 6:30pm on Tuesday. This seems to me to be a clear case of insufficient notice.

The second question I think is more difficult, and perhaps too specific to our arrangement. Our “public notice” consists of placing written copies of the agenda and supporting material on a shelf in a public space outside of our offices. The agenda is placed on top, the supporting material is placed below. The agenda itself is typically one or two pages long, the supporting material may be another 15 to 20 pages. (Typically, each item on our agenda has one to three pages of supporting material.) The agenda is typically posted 48 hours in advance. However, occasionally new material arrives after the agenda is posted. If that material, including the wording of the exact motion that will be made, is inserted into the stack of supporting material for a meeting, but the “agenda” document on top is not changed, has the public been “reasonably apprised”, so long as it occurs more than 24 hours before the scheduled start of a meeting? I note the following passage from the Compliance Guide issued by your office in 2007 ( http://www.doj.state.wi.us/AWP/2007OMCG PRO/2007_OML_Compliance_Guide.pdf )

“Whether a meeting notice reasonably apprises the public of the meeting’s subject matter may also depend in part on the surrounding circumstances. A notice that might be adequate, standing alone, may nonetheless fail to provide reasonable notice if it is accompanied by other statements or actions that expressly contradict it, or if the notice is misleading when considered in the light of long standing policies of the governmental body. (Linde Correspondence, May 4, 2007;) (Koss Correspondence, May 30, 2007.)”

Note that it is a long-standing practice in the UW-Madison student government that so long as the material was in the pile 24 hours before the start of a meeting, even if it did not appear on the agenda,  it would be proper to amend the agenda at the start of the meeting and add the new topic for discussion.

I realize that you probably have better things to do than answer procedural questions for student governments, and this question may be made more difficult by student government’s special circumstances as a part of the University. I’d ask that you simplify your research, and answer as though we were a typical Wisconsin governmental body. Even if it is legal for the UW-Madison student government to provide notice as described above, it is helpful to know if our notices would not be legal if we were any other governmental body.

Thank you in advance for your time.

Erik Paulson
Graduate Student, UW-Madison

The Housing and Tenant Support Services I proposed for the 2010-11 ASM Budget has passed the first few hurdles, and is included in the first draft of the ASM Internal Budget, with $50,000 in funding.  The next stop will be the SSFC, probably sometime in mid January.  Once there, it may be left as-is, raised or lowered, or deleted entirely. I feel fairly confident that the SSFC will see the value and will leave it funded at a significant level before returning the budget back to the Council.

In my initial post, I detailed a number of services that I thought we might want to include in the eventual RFP. My plan is to further develop that list as a draft RFP, and start sending it through ASM and the community looking for feedback.  There are other efforts ongoing this year that we may want to leverage as part of the ASM funds. For example, Alder Bryon Eagon is developing a framework for Landlord/Tenant mediation, crafted towards students. These mediators, with some sort of city certification, could have some legal authority or at least a role to play in eventual court proceedings. It is possible that as part of the services ASM purchases, we could get dedicated time with these mediators. I’ll have much more to say about the RFP in a future post.

One idea that I want to move forward with, even if the Tenant Support Services funding is entirely removed from the ASM Internal Budget is the creation of a housing fair in the fall of 2010. The management of this fair may be something that we ultimately hand over to the contracted service provider, but that provider won’t start until July of 2010 at the earliest. We need to get started before that, so I’m going to propose the initial investigation of a Housing Fair as an ASM Intern Project for the spring semester.

The fair is pretty simple to explain: imagine a college recruiting fair that you might have gone to in high school, but for apartments instead of colleges. It would take place at the Great Hall in Memorial Union, or the Kohl Center’s concourse, or some other larger public space. For the first go-round, I was thinking a one day event, say from 3pm to 7pm.

Landlords, both big and small, would have a booth or a table, and could tell students about their properties in person. They could sign up students for showings on the spot (or, if they really wanted to, sign a lease on the spot, though I wouldn’t encourage that.)

A fair is advantageous for landlords, because it lets them “sell” their apartments in a much more personal way than any advertising they can buy. They’ll also get exposure to many more students in a short time frame, all of who have apartments on their minds.  At the same time, students benefit from a large event, where they can see many options in a short time frame and immediately have their questions answered. Furthermore, they can interact with landlords, and discover apartments that they might never have found. Finally, no fair would be complete without schwag, and who doesn’t want a frisbee with “Steve Brown Apartments” or “CHT” stamped on top?

Concurrent with the fair, we could have short seminars on basic tenant education issues. This would be ideal for the contracted provider to manage. Community services may be interested in having a booth at the fair as well – Community Car, Lazybones Laundry, some of the food delivery services, Charter, etc. It might be a little early for them, but they might be interested and it’s worth inviting them

There’s a higher purpose for the fair, too: if successful, I could imagine the fair being the kickoff to the annual rental season. In 2010, we’d have to have the fair in November for it to be at all relevant. With time, as the fair grows and gains importance, we could push the date for the fair back a bit each year, in effect pushing back the start of the rental season for the upcoming year. The end goal would be to eventually push the start back into the spring semester.

As an aside, Alder Bridget Maniaci has a proposal that’s just about to be taken up city committees that would legislatively accomplish this goal, by prohibiting a landlord from renting an apartment until the current tenant’s lease is at least half up. Currently, the landlord must wait until one quarter is up, hence the mad dash on November 15th. (Up until a few years ago, it was 1/3, but was reduced as part of a compromise to fix other language.) I enthusiastically support Maniaci’s proposal and hope the other downtown Alders sign on, as well as a few from the edges of town. If her proposal passes, we could still have the fair, just later in the year.

A later signing date would be in the best interests of everyone. In November, many students don’t yet know their plans for the next year. They may not know future roommates well enough to really know what they’re getting themselves into. Current tenants have barely unpacked, and may not have even turned on the heat in their apartments and have no idea what a Wisconsin winter in their apartment is like before being asked to renew for another year.

There is also the possibility of eventually hosting a second fair, near the end of May. This would help students who weren’t in Madison this spring, such as study-abroad students, but the main beneficiaries would be first year graduate and professional students. They have an extremely difficult task of finding housing, usually in a one or two day whirlwind visit. I know in Computer Sciences, most first-year students have terrible apartments, and move after their first year when they can actually search for apartments.  It would be a relief if they could attend a fair on say a Thursday, and look at apartments on Friday or Saturday.  Many landlords also prefer not to list their apartments in the fall rush, and instead would rather wait until later in the year. Often, this is an attempt to legally discriminate against students, so they probably wouldn’t participate anyway, but if it was aimed more at graduate students it might be a different story. This is likely not something we can pull off in the spring of 2011, but could be attempted in future years.

Now, for some boring logistics, and the part of the post that’s a little more aimed at ASM.  First, this is probably big enough that it will take two interns. I’m indifferent as to where they’ll wind up; this seems appropriate for interns with Academic Affairs, Legislative Affairs, or Shared Gov, or interns who work with the Chair or Vice Chair. There’s enough stuff going on with the city that Leg Affairs is probably my first choice, but if one of the chairs feels strongly about it, they can have it.

The goals for the intern part of the project are to organize a couple of different things, not necessarily to run the actual fair.  First, we need to really flesh out the plan for how the fair would work. Then, with something we can take to landlords, we need to gain the support of enough landlords to make it worthwhile doing. Working with some of the big landlords, as well as the Apartment Associations is key here.  We’ll also want to talk with city Alders, the Housing Committee, and the Campus Area Housing office of the University.

We want to make it as frictionless as possible to get people to attend, both presenters and students. Ideally we wouldn’t charge any landlords anything to have a booth at the fair, but if we have costs for the fair we’ll need to find a way to pay for them.

The final wrap-up will be to come up with a management structure for the fair, so we can hand it off to someone at the end of the semester, and as much as possible have them just execute the strategy we put together this spring.

This is much more of a write-up than would typically be done for an ASM Intern project. This relates to my legislation requiring Council sign-off on Intern Projects, and is above and beyond what I had in mind for other proposals.

The next step for this proposal will be at the ASM Student Council on December 9th 2009. Please feel free to email me or other any council member with feedback, leave a comment, or come and speak at Open Forum. I think I’ll move to refer it to a couple of different committees for further feedback, and then on to the Chair for possible implementation in the spring.

One of my favorite documentaries is Man Made: Incredible Islands (and the recycled footage in some other National Geographic Megastructure episodes). I like construction documentaries, and ocean documentaries, so building islands was a perfect combo. National Geographic did me a favor by simply staying on the island building, and about the only thing to be annoyed with were the obnoxious, greedy foreign investors who had far too much money for anyone’s good. (See also: House Hunters International. Great scenery, but I want to beat the people buying a second house with my shoe for their pettiness)

By focusing on the engineering only, National Geographic avoided the three absurdities that really define Dubai: an impossible business model, an unavoidable ecological disaster, and a human rights tragedy.

That Dubai was a bad investment was obvious right away. You’re never going to build a tourist destination somewhere that Sharia law holds. However, this will be the big news for the next couple of days. (Already tonight the NYTimes has a couple of stories on how it was all a mirage)

Building ski slopes and golf courses in the middle of the desert was also crazy, at least with the current generation of solar power options. Warning flags had been raised, but as illustrated by the National Geographic documentaries, mostly ignored. You’ll start to see more ecological warnings as part of the debt coverage.

Dubai’s human rights failings are also well-known. (If you read nothing else on Dubai, read this).  Now that it’s clear the wheels have come off Dubai’s building boom, I think we’ll also start to see more articles like this calling out Dubai for using slave labor.

It’s not like this is the lone holdout of modern-day slavery. Sadly, it took losing a lot of money before the world seemed to notice. Hopefully a few people will read about it before Tiger Woods issues another web release and pushes it off the front page.