By Sean WilliamsSTAFF WRITER
The Student Government Association (SGA) received 45 club applications for about 17 office spaces, and the office space committee began making its preliminary decisions on which Hofstra clubs would receive office space for the next two years. The committee started making decisions about office reallocation over the weekend.
“We spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday all day taking the 45 applications and either saying that they needed an office, storage or that we didn’t feel they needed one,” said Alexandra Engelson, SGA club relations chair.
They looked at candidates’ storage needs, on-campus activity, club size, OSLA workshop attendance, club history and last semester’s rollback – the amount of money the club requested from SGA that it did not use.
The office space application included approximately 15 open-ended questions so clubs could answer at any length they felt was appropriate for the question.
Engelson believes that the allocation process will run much smoother now than it did the last time it occurred, in spring 2012, when a number of communication problems resulted in confusion and a number of unhappy clubs.
Engelson has also pushed legislation that suggested that office space be re-evaluated after two years rather than the previous rule, which dictated re-evaluation every four years. There was an informal legislation meeting where 25 club leaders expressed unanimous interest in the two-year plan.
“I strongly believe that it’s not fair for a club to have to wait four years to have to reapply for an office because leadership could change and they may not use it anymore, or new clubs could be founded and they need help,” Engelson said. “We want to be very transparent with clubs. We know that this has to do with clubs and this is their fate, and we don’t want them to feel like we’re railroading them.”
Right now, the demand for storage among clubs is so high that one of the office spaces will exist solely for that purpose. If a club does not receive a space and its members feel like they need one to function, the club can talk to the office allocations committee about alternatives.
“A lot of clubs have a lot of stuff, and we want to accommodate them as much as possible,” Engelson said.
The committee is comprised of Engelson, four individuals from the club relations committee, the rules chair and the appropriations chair – people selected due to familiarity with Hofstra’s clubs in regards to constitutions and policies. They are the only people right now who know the possibilities and they will pass these suggestions along to the senate, which will vote on and finalize the plans.
“I wasn’t here for [the 2012 reallocations] but believe me, everybody has heard about the problems and that’s why we took as much time as we did,” said SGA public relations chair Forrest Gitlin. “We didn’t take the process lightly, we took every application and considered every application thoroughly.”
The formal announcement will take place during the senate meeting in Plaza East this Thursday at 6:30 p.m.
Engelson believes that club presence during the announcement process could cause some tension. “Senate can get heated. We have a lot of senators who feel very strongly about issues and it’s good because we might have overlooked something,” she said.
“There could be riots, there could be a lot of happy people, a lot of sad people,” Engelson said.