CSU East Bay’s ASI Board of Directors and its Personnel Committee proposed changes to its Elections Committee Code and eligibility requirements to ensure a smoother transition between ASI Boards in the future, said Randy Saffold, executive director of Associated Students, Inc.

The proposed changes would add an extra one quarter of service requirement which the student could serve on the ASI Board, on an ASI Committee, or within the Student Staff according to Saffold.

Currently, in order for a student to become a member of ASI they must be enrolled in a minimum of nine units as an undergraduate and a minimum of four units as a graduate. Along with maintaining unit requirements, both undergraduate and graduate students must maintain an average grade point average of 2.0 or above.

This one quarter of service requirement proposed is much like the California State Student Association’s requirement for their junior student trustees said Jerry Chang, CSUEB’s previous ASI president who was recently appointed as CSSA’s Vice President of Finance earlier this year.

“CSSA requires their junior trustees to serve for a year without voting power while they learn about the different aspects of the board. These students applying for a position on ASI would use their time allotted to learn the processes and procedures of the ASI board so they can be more informed on the current issues and protocols,” said Chang in a previous interview with The Pioneer.

While the proposed one quarter of service requirement has been sent to the Office of the President for review, ASI bylaws are currently being amended in order to correct ambiguous language or missed inferred items.

For example, it was implicitly understood that the board hires the Executive Director to manage personal affairs of ASI employees and the staff and report to the Vice President for Student Affairs, but the bylaws did not state that explicitly, explained Saffold. That oversight is being corrected.

“In the two and a half years I’ve been at the university, the bylaws have only been amended twice,” said Saffold. Operational changes to the bylaws will occur at the end of the current board’s term when officer titles will be changed to reflect their different levels of responsibility he added.

Lastly, the ASI bylaws touched on the results of key ballot initiatives, one of which focused on the creation of a smoke-free campus. This initiative received 340 student votes in support of completely banning smoking from the CSUEB campus. Another 341 students voted in support of designated smoking areas.

Another ballot initiative dealt with the CSSA’s three-tiered membership fee passed in March which increased the CSSA student fee from 62 cents per student per campus to 65 cents and will add an additional one cent per student per campus for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 fiscal years, the CSSA website stated. The creation of this fee will free up approximately $9,000 annually from the ASI budget to fund additional activities to support the mission of ASI reads the initiative. 376 students at CSUEB were in support of the initiative, while 435 students disapproved.

Although the ballot results only represent the voter’s approval or disapproval of proposed initiatives, the ASI board continues to use them to help make decisions in future planning and implementation processes on the university campus.