SGA seeks to improve campus security

The Student Government Association met last Friday to discuss several university issues, including travel fund application concerns, campus security and graduation stoles for the Spring 2017 commencement.

During the meeting, Peter Averack, vice president on the Edinburg campus, said the SGA met with UTRGV Police Chief Raul Munguia last Thursday to discuss how to improve campus security.

“[We want to make] sure that both campuses are safe once the sun goes down and nobody has to worry about their safety,” Averack said. “They just have to worry about their grades. That is the idea.”

He said the security surveillance on both campuses is inefficient.

Munguia told the SGA in order to control the surveillance system more efficiently, his department should have a special building in order to help with camera maintenance, Averack said.

Currently, each UTRGV department and respective building manager are in charge of camera maintenance.

“[UTRGV Police Department] is asking for us to try to do a survey or a report on the campus community to see if we are missing cameras,” Averack said. “Each building has sort of a building manager and each department purchases each camera system. So, the building manager, together with the department, is sort of in charge of the maintenance of the cameras.”

Averack said University Police and the SGA will work together to address different campus community issues.

“We were able to develop that relationship with the UTRGV PD, to understand what it is potentially what we are going to be able to do as SGA to support the things that they might need in order to make sure that security is at peak,” he said. “And that is that. … We do address these different potential concerns that we are finally able to find out about.”

Averack also said the SGA will partner with Sodexo in order to lower prices on food items for the campus community.

“It is exciting because [Sodexo is] very open to our work to moving prices around as far as what we discussed,” he said. “We are in the process of developing a list of the different items that are at the different stores that we could cut off the price of. They are actually open to that idea.”

In the Brownsville’s vice president’s report, Alondra Galvan sent a letter with the printing statistics, so far, for academic year 2016-2017.

The university has 88 printers for use by students. Seventy-nine are in Edinburg and nine are on the Brownsville campus.

The SGA is working on having more printers available in Brownsville, according to Galvan’s report.

Gabriela Azuara, Internal Affairs Committee chair, said this year’s graduation stoles will be longer.

“Definitely, this semester the stoles are going to be a lot longer than what we usually have,” Azuara said. “Right now, we are looking for the stoles to be blue.”

This year’s stoles are going to be 72 inches and will have the UTRGV logo with orange and white embroidery.

Cristina Garcia, administrative assistant for Student Involvement, attended the meeting to explain the SGA travel fund process.

“The process is very lengthy and it tends to be kind of tedious when it comes to actually identifying who is eligible and non-eligible for the funds,” Garcia said. “We have a lot of student’s phone calls and walk-ins complaining about the actual application taking a very long time. … [Students] do not understand the process and what it takes in order to have all the applications to be done sufficiently and correctly.”

She said the problem of awarding different university clubs with travel funds is that students often turn in incomplete applications.

“The problem is that most students turn in their applications while they are very rushed,” Garcia said. “So, [for example] out of 45 students that wanted to get money for their trip, I only have 15 full applications. The rest are missing ID numbers, the rest don’t have their last name. … So, we have to get back to the students and ask for the missing information and that can take about two to three weeks depending on what their response is.”

In other SGA news, English junior Abel Puga was appointed senator for the College of Liberal Arts.

The next SGA meeting is scheduled at 2 p.m. Friday in Academic Services Building Room 1.106 in Edinburg and in Biomedical Research and Health Building Room 1.222 in Brownsville. All SGA meetings are open to students.