Quad elections proceed as WEL voting delayed

Despite a flood in the West-Edens Link that interrupted voting, quadrangle council elections ran smoothly Sunday night with higher than expected turnout.

Other than the WEL, each of the West Campus quads filled their executive offices. However, many of the residential advisor representative positions were left unfilled. Campus Council President Andrew Nurkin said the unfilled RA representative spots--this year's equivalent of quad council representatives from each house--can still be filled sometime in the next week.

"Once students came down and saw that [the RA representative] spots were uncontested, that seemed to generate a little more interest," said Few Quad Residence Coordinator Tegwin Millard. "The idea of a lack of representation kind of jolted people."

Last year, elections in three quads--Crowell, Wannamaker and Clocktower--were called into question after irregular voting procedures, but Nurkin said that as of Monday evening, there had been no problems reported.

"Everything that I heard is that it ran really smoothly," said Nurkin, a senior. "We had very high turnout and several of the elections were contested pretty hotly."

Voting in the WEL was nearly completed before the fire alarms began ringing, the sprinkler system on the sixth floor of Building B went off and residents were evacuated. WEL RC Stephanie Carter said she sent out an e-mail to residents Monday asking if any still wanted to vote and that she would release the final results Tuesday.

Under the new residential life system, most programming decisions and funds have been placed in the hands of quad councils--made up of a president, vice-president, treasurer and communications coordinator, as well as a representative to the 16-member Campus Council and RA representatives. Approximately $18 of each student's residential fee is given to each quad council, which they can use for programming.

In a major change from previous years, quad councils no longer are allowed to accept funding requests from outside groups--thereby cutting off a major source of income for student organizations. To offset the change, $5 of the residential fee previously used by Campus Council, quad councils and house councils has been given to the Student Organization Funding Committee, the primary funding group on campus.

Under Campus Council's newly amended constitution, each quad also must host a certain number of events each semester in numerous categories, including community outreach and Durham interaction, faculty interaction, cultural and special interest activities and social/campus interaction.

"There are certain levels of programming that we expect from the quads, [and the new system] is meant to make sure that they're spending that money appropriately," Nurkin said.

He added that the system is similar to the annual review process for selective houses, without the punitive aspect, and that in the inaugural year, Campus Council will be lenient on the requirements.

Central Campus elected its quad council representatives Sunday night as well. East Campus held house council elections last week and will elect two freshmen to Campus Council this week.

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