The Associated Students, Inc. Senate passed a resolution Wednesday afternoon that includes four bills that will be presented to state legislatures at the California Higher Education Student Summit.
ASI Lobby Corp. and those delegated to be representatives at CHESS will advocate for the four assembly bills and lobby for on behalf of California State University, Long Beach students.
“When we were looking up the legislations, we were looking at legislations that affected our student population,” ASI Sen. Miriam Hernandez said.
One of the assembly bills included within the resolution was Assembly Bill 7, which would mandate that Oct. 25 would be Larry Itliong Day. Itliong was a Filipino activist who worked with Cesar Chavez to create the United Farm Workers and protested the conditions of working on farms for Filipino immigrants in California.
“We have a large Filipino population and often use Cesar Chavez as this prominent leader in the movement but we don’t give credit to [Filipinos], to Itliong, which represents a Filipino community,” Hernandez said.
There were a total of five assembly bills on the resolution, but the senate removed Assembly Bill 42. This bill would have prohibited mandatory system-wide fees or tuition increases in CSUs and any fees would have had to be approved by a student vote of 2:3.
The senate removed the bill because its definition of a student success fee was too broad of a term due to the fact that it mandated all fees.
Hernandez said that the money that is received from the student success fee is necessary to maintain services at CSULB, and if a budget cut were to occur then the services would be unable to sustain themselves.
The student success fee expanded the campus shuttles, student centers and services offered at the Student Health Service, according to the CSULB Budget Central.
“This is an early stage of the legislation so it still has room to kind of change, that’s why I wanted it to stay, but because it was removed doesn’t mean the lobby corp. can’t still talk about it,” Hernandez said.
ASI Lobby Corp. and delegates who were chosen to represent CSULB will take the resolution with them to CHESS, an annual conference that educates and empowers CSU students to advocate effectively.
CHESS will take place in Sacramento Feb. 28 to March 2 and is the only conference for CSU students to advocate for higher education.
ASI Lobby Corp. will be able to lobby for Assembly Bill 42 at CHESS because the senate decided to support this bill so that students could “voice their opinions about these fees,” Hernandez said.
Other assembly bills within the resolution include Assembly Bill 27, which will allow for out of state veterans, who were stationed for active duty in California for more than one year, to pay in-state tuition instead of out-of-state tuition under the G.I. Bill.
The existing law covers veterans for one year if they file an affidavit saying they will establish a residence in California.