ASWSU’s annual student body election will be held March 5 and 6.
The ballot will have elections for open ASWSU Senate positions, the President and Vice President positions and a referendum to raise the cost of the Chinook undergraduate fee.
“For the student fee initiative to pass, we need 20% of the student body to vote, but for the elected positions, the winners will be elected regardless of how many students vote,” ASWSU President Luke Deschenes said.
The Chinook building fee is the only referendum running on the ballot this election cycle, said Deschenes. The referendum will be presented as a yes or no question to the student body or whether or not to increase the Chinook fee by 5%, bringing it from $98 to $103 a semester.
The referendum also includes a clause that, if passed, will give the ASWSU senate the ability to increase the Chinook fee by 5% in future years as if they see fit or, as the Student Recreation Advisory Board recommends, without it going to a student election, said all-campus senator Isaac Velazquez. If the referendum is not passed, the Chinook will see hours dramatically cut and services such as the Esports lounge closed.
“The UREC initially presented the Chinook fee increase to us; in their bylaws, it says that the senate approves an increase of 5% for them and we initially did approve that increase,” Velazquez said. “We later learned that our own bylaws state that any student fee increase must go through the ballot first.”
Velazquez said he wrote the Chinook fee referendum after the senators were questioning as to who would take it on. This voting stipulation is due to a student-fee bylaw put in place by ASWSU, although Washington state law allows them to increase student fees by up to 5%.
The Board of Regents will be meeting on March 7 and will discuss two other possible fee increases. These fee increases are a $20 increase in the CUB fee and a $7 increase in the Rec center fee.
Eleven senate positions are running on the ballot. Some senatorial spots are vacant for this election, as nobody declared candidacy for them and those positions will remain vacant until the president-elect fills them post-election, Deschenes said.
“All the senate positions also need to be voted on and they’re all voted on by college, except for all-campus positions,” Velazquez said.
Deschenes said the majority of the candidates on this year’s ballot are incumbents and a lot of positions are going unchallenged. Students can find out more about the election positions and the Chinook fee increase on the ASWSU and UREC websites, as well as at informational booths in the Student Recreation Center, the CUB and the Chinook.
