After months of planning and meetings, there will be no October referendum on student fees.
At Wednesday’s AMS meeting, council decided not to bring forward any motions for a referendum, instead opting to wait until the new year in order to synchronize it with the UPass vote.
The planned questions for the October referendum included tying AMS fees to the Consumer Price Index, a number of fee increases that totaled $23 a year and various by-law changes.
In a presentation to council, VP Finance Elin Tayyar and VP Academic Ben Cappellacci argued to councillors that while a referendum will be necessary in the near future, it was in the AMS’s best interest to hold off.
“We’ve hit a bend in the river, a fork in the road,” said Cappellacci. “And we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot by doing it now.”
The AMS will hold a referendum early next year over whether or not to renew the UPass at a new $30/month rate. In previous referendums for the UPass in 2005 and 2008, other questions on the ballot achieved quorum with ease because of the overwhelming number of students who voted. The proposed October ballot initiatives will now likely appear alongside the UPass referendum.
Despite being the strongest proponent of an October vote for several months, AMS President Bijan Ahmadian is confident that postponing the referendum means the questions are more likely to achieve quorum.
“I think it was the right decision,” he said.
“We need to do some more market research on this to see what it is students want and what is of value to them and [we] need to look at brand awareness a little bit more.”
The delay in the referendum also reopens the question of whether the AMS will ask students to increase their fees in addition to tying them to CPI.
“The CPI question is the minimum question we should tie in and the [increased] fee is…a question for market research,” said Ahmadian.
“The by-laws [are] also something we should tie in, because the by-laws are really out of date and incompatible with the Society Act and we need to change that.”
According to Tayyar, the executive made the decision to not pursue an October referendum only the night before Wednesday’s council meeting.
Cappellacci still believes that a referendum is essential to the financial survival of the AMS.
“If we don’t want to face a bunch of cuts and if we want to keep the budget, we need to face a referendum,” he said.
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