SA Senate falls short in second vote to pass resolution to raise e-board stipends to $24,180

After a nearly two-hour-long meeting Friday evening, the undergraduate Student Association (SA) Senate voted to pass a second resolution to raise annual e-board stipends to $24,180 in a vote of 10 ayes and four nays. 

But the 10 votes fell short of the 13 needed to officially implement the change per the SA bylaws that required the majority of the Senate and so, was recorded as a “preliminary denial” during the meeting.

The resolution was SA President Aisha Adam’s second attempt to push for a raise for the five positions on SA’s e-board: president, vice president for advocacy, vice president for clubs, vice president for events and treasurer. 

E-board members earn a flat stipend of $375.00 per week, totaling $19,500 annually, after the Senate ended the annual stipend of $15,570 two years prior. 

The first resolution — introduced during a Senate meeting April 22 — aligned the e-board weekly stipends to the highest hourly wage granted to a UB student employee multiplied by an estimate of 20 hours, totaling to at least $460.00 as a baseline. Adam told The Spectrum at the time that she averaged 35.4 hours per week but only had been compensated for 880 out of the 1,557 total, and that eight years of SA records had presidents “consistently overshooting upwards of almost one and a half or double their weekly hour stipends.”

But senators, including two vice presidents, criticized the maneuver at the time, saying that the newly added vice presidential positions didn’t justify the pay raises. The resolution was voted down with eight ayes, five nays and six abstains.  

This time, a flat weekly stipend of $465.00 — totaling $24,180 annually — was on the table.

Adam told The Spectrum Friday that the “content of this issue does not go away” where e-board members work more hours than they’re compensated for.

“I think the Senate has a responsibility to oversee e-board task completion, oversee e-board performance. I also think that they’re the only body capable of making sure that we’re equitably creating opportunities in SA for everybody and the current way that it’s set up is just not that way,” Adam said. “It’s not fair for us to demand so much labor from people with these very intricate job descriptions and then not compensate them for it.”

Senators were generally warmer to the idea during Friday’s meeting.

Senator Cole DeVantier said that he has to work a full-time job to be able to attend UB, and that if he wasn’t being paid, he would not be able to afford an e-board position. 

“Opening up the role to people that might want to be in that role but they might just not have the means to do it is a good idea,” DeVantier said. “There’s a lot of people that might want to do it but they might not be able to because they have to support themselves.”

Several senators were still hesitant to support the resolution at first. Some said they would pass the resolution if it only detailed raises for only the president and treasurer positions, while others brought up concerns on whether the future performances of e-board members would justify the increase now.

An SA employee also criticized the proposed raises. Evie Wolland, SA’s director of club services, called Adam and Treasurer Jack Koscinski “the most passive she’s seen as president and treasurer” in her two and a half years of working at SA, and that she didn’t see them during the summer or winter breaks. 

Adam said that Wolland was “an employee that has voiced an exceptional amount of frustration with the restructuring of SA and the inclusion of two new VPs which led to the restructuring her department,” resulting in a “personal context and frustration behind those comments.”

Vice President for Events Benjamin Lau called the raise a “big jump within a four-year time span” and repeated his previous concerns that the vice presidential positions weren’t worth the pay raises.

“That’s a lot of money that we could use for smaller programs and events, more club budgets or channels of additional supplemental funding so that more clubs get more funds,” Lau said. “Within our roles, there’s not much we can do.”

Adam asked Lau if he felt that he deserved the stipend he had to which Lau said, “No.”

“Then why have you not resigned?” Adam responded. 

When Lau said, “Because this is the role that I care about a lot,” Adam then asked, “Do you think that it would be appropriate for the Senate body to then impeach you for non-performance of your duties?”

In response, Lau said that he worked 30 to 40 hours during the weeks SA hosted events such as Fest and Homecoming Carnival, which overshot the stipend, but that he felt he didn’t work up to the stipend during other weeks.

Adam said that Lau was projecting his “personal guilt about not doing enough of your job,” and that “not earning your stipend has nothing to do with how much work there was to do.” 

“This idea that certain roles are inherently pre-postured or predisposed to less work is a result of your anecdotal experience with one year of an administration where you’ve seen more work out of the president and treasurer than vice presidents,” Adam said. “As the person who oversees all the staff in the office, I can say comfortably you didn’t meet the expectations of your goal. You underperformed your role. You did collect more money than you worked.”

Lau texted The Spectrum Saturday, saying that some weeks “doesn’t require 20 hours a week of work.”

“Even if there is ‘always work to be done,’ the work some weeks won’t equate to 20 hours a week,” Lau wrote. 

Nasra Isse, SA’s special interest council coordinator, said that someone being overcompensated for the job that they’re not doing properly should be made the norm as “you can easily take that money away.”

SA Senator Aeaad Alawaad told Adam that if Lau was underperforming throughout the entire year, it would give him a “reason to impeach you.” 

“Like if you came up to me or any of us and said, ‘Hey, Ben wasn’t doing this, this, this or this,’ we’d say, ‘OK, Ben. It looks good and we’ll set the resolution of impeachment during this meeting,’” Alawaad said. “You never did that so that makes me want to impeach you because you didn’t give us the best people.” 

None of the e-board officers failed at their core duties and that there was “no tangible damage” that warranted an impeachment, Adam said.

“There’s a certain work ethic that I carry in my work that I would like to see replicated across my board and to the extent that it was appropriate, I did take ownership over my board,” Adam said. “And when I say that I think they underperformed, I mean relative to that.”

Akash Shah, SA’s international council coordinator, said a few thousand dollars more is worth having a better, efficient-running SA. 

“I don’t understand how we can sit here and act like everybody’s going to do a bad job in office or everybody’s going to slack or everybody’s not going to step up and put their best foot forward ever or take initiative the way we’ve seen the e-board members do and not do the last three years,” Shah said.

Senate Chairperson Aidan Thomas said that the Senate should have been asking what’s happening with SA, and that next year, he wanted to see it take more oversight on the e-board members. 

Voting to pass the resolution to compensate the members more fairly should come with the “absolute understanding” that if any of them were to not meet the standard would be called to the Senate, questioned and impeached, Thomas said.

“Impeachment is frankly quite underused. An objective standpoint could say that we all should have been impeached this year for not doing as much as we should,” Thomas said. “I’m absolutely open to this resolution but I think this coming year is going to bring a large shift in how this organization operates.”

The resolution will be on the docket again during this year's last Senate meeting Wednesday evening.

Beyonce Thomas-Reynoso contributed to the reporting of this article.

Mylien Lai is the senior news editor and can be reached at mylien.lai@ubspectrum.com. 

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