Elections for the Associated Students Inc. (ASI) offices are in full swing. Like all ASI offices, the president must be a person dedicated to student advocacy.
Photo by Roe Borunda / The Collegian
The position of president encompasses many responsibilities. These are myriad and include chairing committees, aiding in budget structure and being the voice and representative of the Fresno State student body.
The president works in conjunction with the other executives. One of these is the vice president of finance, whose job it is to construct the budget.
“The senate is the voting power on the budget,” said 2012-2013 ASI president Arthur Montejano.
It is up to the president to sign off on expense reports. These expense reports show the utilization of money that was designated through the budget.
One job done by the president is signing off on expense reports.
“Day to day, my control over the budget falls under the purview of I sign off on a lot of expense forms,” said Montejano. “But even then it’s incumbent on any ASI president to really take a look at what those forms look like. And are they capturing the information that we need?”
Montejano said the reports should line up with what the approved budget has listed as acceptable use of funds.
The money from the ASI budget comes from student fees and is used to fund campus clubs and organization. Sometimes, the senate allocates money to operations outside of clubs in order to help students. One of these allocations was the $15,000 given to keep library hours intact in the midst of state budget cuts.
Along with budgetary management, the president acts as the chief executive officer of ASI.
In this capacity, the president oversees the executives””vice president of finance, vice president of external affairs and executive vice president””and the operation of the corporation.
As the leader of the organization, the president’s role includes meeting with the university president, provost and vice president of student affairs. The ASI president is involved with a number of campus committees.“As student body president, you are ‘The Student,’” Montejano said. “You are supposed to represent students on every committee that designates a student representative.”
Sometimes other students can be designated to sit on committees instead of the president.
In order to appoint these students, ASI has the personnel committee. The ASI president is the chairman. This committee recommends people to the other campus committees.
Any student may apply for an appointment to a committee. These include campus committees as well as California State University system committees.
“The CSU has this concept of shared governance. And so what it says is that administration, faculty and students all have a voice at the table,” Montejano said.