SGA holds open forum at South Campus

Kaely Holloway

The Student Government Association held their weekly meeting on South Campus on Tuesday night to host an open forum and hear from students there.

The forum allowed for any representatives from South Campus to speak on any issue.

During this forum, SGA President Keyana Boka encouraged those in attendance to discuss the South Campus bookstore recently closing.

“Recently it’s come to our attention that the South Campus WKU store around the corner has closed and so we want to talk about any challenges or concerns that could come up because of that,” Boka said.

Debate and conversation was sparked as senators discussed the lack of communication between officials in charge of closing the store, and South Campus students.

“The same exact thing happened last year when they closed the food court,” Mark Reeves, executive vice president, said. “I see this as part of a broader issue of lack of consulting South Campus students and kind of demonstrating a lack of concern or respect even.”

After the forum, SGA business continued as normal. Five pieces of legislation, three bills and two resolutions were passed by the Senate.

Funding for the KwikBoost charger stations was finally approved after being previously vetoed and then tabled. SGA now will fund two phone charging stations to go in WKU Libraries locations.

SGA will also support a study into the creation of a new parking structure on campus. Previously, the bill had included a proposal to raise parking permit fees to $135 in order to fund the creation of a new structure.

“Listening to the feedback that was brought up at the last SGA, we edited it,” senator Jody Dahmer, who helped draft the proposal, said.

This was struck from the final draft of the bill that was passed on Tuesday. The draft presented tonight allowed determination of raising money for the structure to be left for a later date.

“Politically, as students we don’t need to suggest raising fees,” Reeves said.

The final resolution passed involved including benches in the bus stations across campus. This resolution came about after a student speaker, Logan Eckler, came before SGA weeks ago, desiring action to be taken to make campus more accessible to handicapped.

“We support the addition of benches in bus stations that don’t have them,” senator Josh Knight said.

Organizational Aid allotted $1,740 to go to four WKU organizations respectively.

SGA also passed their standard bill to provide money to extend library hours during finals week, both this semester and next semester.

One bill went into first read. This bill involved allocating money for two WKU organizations, the fraternity Phi Gamma Delta and the National Dance Education Organization Western Kentucky University Student Chapter.

There will be no SGA meeting held next week due to the upcoming holiday.