From campaign platforms to senate meetings, transparency is a hot topic for the Associated Students of the University of Nevada, the university’s student body government. But ASUN recently fell short in this transparency, struggling to meet standards laid out in Nevada law for a period beginning in the summer and into the fall semester.
Sandra Rodriguez, Director of the Center for Student Engagement, oversees ASUN operations. She explained that ASUN, as a public body, is held to Nevada Open Meeting Law. Open Meeting Law covers public access to meetings of government bodies, including minutes –– recordings, written or audio, of what happens in these meetings. This includes the ASUN’s senate and any related committees.
According to Nevada’s Open Meeting Law Portal, public bodies are required to make written, and any audio, minutes available to the public within 30 working days of the meeting. As of Sept. 2 this year, recurring senate meetings beginning May 8 and ending July 24 had technically passed this deadline without audio recordings of the meetings made public. Minutes are usually posted on the ASUN website, along with meeting details like time, location and agenda.
As of Sept. 25, all the audio minutes from senate meetings except the one on May 29 had been posted. Written minutes, which also need to be made available within 30 working days, were still missing from postings for all the senate meetings from April 17 to Sept. 18, except for July 24. For last year’s senate session, the 91st, written minutes were still missing for meetings dating back to November 2023. Before they’re uploaded, they’ll also be subject to a review by the senate that allows senators to correct the written record if they don’t feel it reflects what they said the meetings.
ASUN relies on a team of four student secretaries and a legislative clerk to keep the minutes up-to-date. But student secretaries graduate, explained Rodriguez. The most senior member of the team now is Faith Johnson, who serves as Secretary of the Senate. Johnson has been in the position since this May, and has been catching up ever since.
“We’re trying our very best to complete everything that was left over from the 91st [session] while doing the 92nd,” Johnson said. “At the end of the day, we are students ourselves. We do understand the urgency, and we want to be held accountable.”
The Center for Student Engagement also lost Ben Griffith, an information technology professional.
“An integral part of the transparency is posting of minutes, keeping track of resolutions and bills, so our IT person plays a role in that,” Rodriguez said. “Our previous IT coordinator got hired away by the state legislature to do that work for them.”
According to Rodriguez, 5 months passed before the CSE hired a replacement, who then had to learn ASUN’s online infrastructure.
Regardless, she argued that ASUN has a long history of record-keeping and transparency.
“Go to the library, and you will find minutes going back a hundred years,” Rodriguez said. “That is a powerful statement about students on this campus and their willingness to be held accountable.”
For the time being, however, secretaries still have plenty to transcribe.
“Obviously, it’s kind of a big job, and it’s very tedious,” Johnson said. “I think the consensus among all of us is, we really enjoy doing it. We just enjoy the process of making sure everything for our peers is accessible.”
And Rodriguez predicts smooth sailing for the record-keeping process for the foreseeable future.
“Every five years it has a hiccup, when we have a transition,” Rodriguez said.
Peregrine Hart can be reached via email at peregrineh@unr.edu or on Instagram via @pintofperegrine.
