Student Government Association approved its budget and passed 15 bylaw amendments at its last meeting of the year on April 21.

"This year we really didn't change our budget very much, and I think that was kind of a strategic decision because we've tweaked it here and there for that last several years, and I think it was time to let it stay as it is," SGA President Benny Dorris said. "We always want to save room in our operating budget so that we can ensure that we have the money to fund projects like we've been able to do this year.

Dorris added that with the uncertainty of the future of the involvement ambassadors, a program where students would have access to someone who would help them get more involved on campus, they wanted to leave "wiggle room" to be able to add to the operating budget.

"Another big thing that we did is that we went from percentages to whole numbers, so that way the amounts that we give organizations can fluctuate a little bit without us having to redo percentages and work out weird cents with the numbers," Dorris said. "So that was really just a decision to save us a few headaches whenever we're doing percentages."

The budget, although staying relatively flat, did change, with SGA taking the cost of a radio license from Student Activities Council, while also subtracting that from SAC's budget.

"There are a couple of increases that purely cover [inflation] increases," SGA Vice President Greg Felock said. "So for example, the executive account got a little bit of an increase to cover the cost of the salary increase for our two staff lines."

Every year SGA is required to review the bylaws through a committee consisting of the vice president, parliamentarian and a few members of the senate.

"That's really what prompted us to go through the bylaws, and we look for redundancies, things that we just procedurally don't really do and we make sure that our bylaws say what we do," Felock said.

Felock added that while mostly grammatical changes were made, committee members also checked to make sure that they were following byline procedures and were able to address differences before next year.

"I guess the first kind of unique one is composition of senate," Felock said. "Historically we've always had secondary education majors run in the college of education even though they are technically housed in their respective college for their field. So a history secondary education major runs in education, even though his major is actually in liberal arts. It works out to be a little more representative. Since liberal arts is such a huge college, it makes a little more sense to have them in education. So we put it in our bylaws, to actually make it that way, since it's how we've been doing it since before I've been there."

Felock also pointed out that SGA changed a lot of the number of senators per college last year and it had to fix some of the old numbers that it missed last year.

SGA also looked at some of the special election processes to make them slightly more fair, according to Felock.

"Because student government changes every year, sometimes we tweak our procedures a little bit, so all of the bylaw changes were really to make our bylaws align more closely with what we do," Dorris said. "So it's really just a way to keep ourselves in check so that somebody who's outside of student government can come in, read our bylaws and know how something's going to go procedurally."