The Undergraduate Student Government senate approved Senate Bill 144-04, which will update the USG Department Guidelines for the 2024-25 academic year, Tuesday night.

The senate voted separately on approving each of the five sections’ — Programming, Communications, Funding, Legislative and Allocations — guidelines after a motion from speaker of the senate Diana Carpio. Despite all sections of SB 144-04 gaining unanimous approval, discussion over the section regarding inter-branch collaboration of the Legislative Branch Guidelines was heated.

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The language up for debate involved the assignment of senators to programming assemblies, which was meant to give the assemblies a voice in the senate. Speaker Carpio said the practice had been specifically removed from the Programming Guidelines after a discussion with chief programming officer Hunter Black.

“[The proposal is that] senators reach out to their own legislations that they do have, because in representing their specific projects and assemblies and committees … it will be an open discussion,” Black said during the discussion period on the Legislative Guidelines section of SB 144-04.

Black, along with other audience members, voiced concerns that the programming assemblies felt used in senatorial campaigns and then ignored afterward.

“[Senators will] talk about a project that [they will] work on, but not actually [spend] that time with the assemblies,” said Cameron Bassett, a co-executive director of the Black Student Assembly. “I have been in BSA [for] three years now, and I feel like every year I have come back and heard that we had a senator. I have never seen that senator.”

Audience members called for competitive elections to resolve the issue despite concerns that senators were not held accountable due to a small campus-wide voting population.

“A lot of this holding senators accountable by the assemblies must take place in the context of a competitive election where senators will presumably get bad flak for not representing their assemblies and not doing their due diligence,” Black said in discussion.

Carpio endorsed the approval of the bill before it passed. She cited a phrase that gave her the choice to assign senators or not as a way to leave the power in her hands — someone in favor of the change — while still allowing USG to begin action.

An amendment to pool senator assignments in the Legislative Guidelines is looming over USG’s Sept. 3 meeting. 

“[The relationship between the senate and programming assemblies] has been a long, fraught relationship, and a relationship that is, I will say, to be frank, a little broken,” Black said. “We are moving towards going past that system and looking forward to what we can do in the meantime.”

The senate also heard reports from vice president Brianna Sánchez and speaker Carpio summarizing USG’s activity over the summer. Sánchez said she met with more than a dozen USC offices, including the Office of Campus Support & Intervention and the Office for Equity, Equal Opportunity, and Title IX. Carpio mentioned the summer senate’s work on SB 144-3, a bill that will deal with campus perimeters and gates.

Applications for two vacant senator positions will open soon, while the applications for the fall recruitment cycle were released at 7 a.m. Wednesday, USG president Bryan Fernández said after the meeting.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated Aug. 28 at 2:17 p.m. to add a photo caption.