Student Association will need more time to craft the proposal that lays out the steps for implementing the smoke-free campus initiative.

‘Creating these milestones turned out to be a lot more complicated than we thought,’ said SA Vice President Jessica Cunnington.

SA will host a town hall meeting Wednesday at 7 p.m. in Room 137 at Sims Hall in an effort to get more student feedback on the initiative. SA especially hopes to hear ideas from smokers at SU, Cunnington said.

At Tuesday’s meeting, assemblymembers also removed several campaigning limitations and changed the codes for dually enrolled students who want to run for an assembly seat.

On the smoking issue, Cunnington said even when the final stages of the policy are implemented, the campus would not be 100 percent smoke-free. SA President Neal Casey echoed this idea.

‘We’re not asking the campus to go cold turkey,’ Casey said.

The initiative will start off slowly, possibly with a limit on smoking near the doors of campus buildings, Cunnington said. This is not revolutionary, she said, because many public buildings countrywide forbid smoking within a certain number of feet of the door.

Contrary to what many people think, there is no policy like that in place on SU’s campus, Cunnington said. Many students are under the false impression that smoking is forbidden within 10 feet of university building doors, she said.

After the Wednesday meeting and further work constructing the proposal, Cunnington said she hopes SA will vote on the proposal sometime in the next few weeks.

At the meeting, SA also passed a change in codes regarding campaigning to the student body. In an attempt to increase voter turnout for campus-wide elections, SA deregulated candidates’ campaigning privileges.

Candidates for SA positions that the student body votes for are now allowed to campaign in residence halls and in media publications distributed on campus. Neither had previously been permitted.

Candidates can also provide a URL to the online voting application as part of their campaign, which the codes previously forbade.

There is still no campaigning allowed in computer clusters around campus, and candidates cannot provide any electronic devices that would create additional polling locations.

Casey said he hopes these new privileges for candidates will facilitate getting their names out to the student body, which will in turn increase voter turnout.

‘In my experience, it sometimes seems like candidates had been spending more time trying not to violate the codes than they were doing campaigning,’ Casey said.

Other business discussed:

• Assemblymembers passed a resolution changing codes for dually enrolled students who want to run for an assembly seat. Students may now run for a seat for either college they are enrolled in, regardless of which college is their home school.

• SA is working on getting a student seat on the Academic Coordinating Committee, said Bonnie Kong, chair of the Academic Affairs Committee.

• SA is asking faculty members if they have interest in creating a minor in comedy. If this minor is created, SU will be the first school in the country to have one, Kong said.

• SA is working to open Model United Nations to students of all majors. It is currently only open to students majoring in international relations, Kong said.

• Assemblymember Perry Russom is working to create a position he calls ‘director of wow.’ The director would be in charge of cheering up the daily lives of students. One idea he presented was piping music onto various parts of campus. Efforts like this one have increased involvement in student government, Russom said.

• John Adams, a senior paralegal student in University College, and Elise Balaban, a sophomore political science major, were elected to the Committee on Administrative Operations.

spcotter@syr.edu

Published on February 15, 2011 at 12:00 pm