Your Student Assembly passed the Help Haiti Now Act, the Equal Access to Public Buildings Act and the Bottle Water Awareness Act during Tuesday night’s meeting in palatial Miller Hall.
The Help Haiti Now Act allocates $1,000 from the off-campus account for the purchase of 200 shirts designed by William and Mary Supports Haiti. The shirts will be sold for $10 each, with all proceeds going to the only degree-awarding university in Haiti, the University of Fondwa. Some senators voiced concerns about how many shirts they could expect to sell, but once the fashionable yet casual design was presented 200 seemed perfectly reasonable.
The off-campus account is money generated by the SA, giving them full discretion regarding its use — and considering that last week the SA used student money to pay for their own field trip to Richmond, supporting a severely damaged nation seems like a wiser use of funds.
The Road to Richmond program wouldn’t have seemed as useless, but since the democratically-controlled Virginia Senate recently passed the Virginia Health Care Freedom Act it’s become clear that any attempt to reason with the governing body is futile. The bill merely serves as way for Virginia legislators to counter any possible attempt of the Obama administration to establish national health care before it even happens and regardless of its content. At the very least, it’s preemptive and pig-headed.
The Equal Access to Public Buildings on Campus Act strongly encourages the administration to open Miller Hall to students 24 hours a day and notes that if the administration does not respond that the sponsors will conduct a thorough campaign to advertise their cause. I have to say that before the senate moved their meetings to Miller Hall I didn’t really care about this issue, but it really is a beautiful building and since it was totally absurd to build such a monstrosity in midst of budget cuts, the least the administration could do is open the building to all students.
The Bottle Water Awareness Act allocates $500 from the consolidated reserve to supplement funds already raised for a week’s activities devoted to telling people how ignorant drinking bottled water is when you could just fill up a reusable container. Not drinking bottled water is literally the least you could do in the effort to not completely fill the earth with garbage. It’s a shame that money has to be spent to tell people about this, but as the Virginia Senate as demonstrated, people in Virginia are _thick_.
