Six years ago the AMS eliminated its Oversight Committee, a committee tasked with holding executives accountable. Now, AMS Council has voted to bring an oversight committee back, in a different form.
Last year, the AMS’s Governance Review Committee was tasked with conducting an internal review of AMS Council and its effectiveness. On executive oversight, the committee found there were few consequences for ineffective executives, and the executives felt they were not getting useful feedback from councillors.
Since bringing draft recommendations to Council in the fall, the AMS has eliminated several Council positions via referendum, has made changes to goal setting and has approved the creation of an Executive Performance & Accountability Committee to replace the Ethics and Accountability Committee formed in the wake of a conflict of interest scandal in 2020.
The original Oversight Committee was created in 2007, and its review of the executives progress on meeting their goal determined how much of a $5,000 bonus each executive received. In 2016, the AMS eliminated its Oversight Committee after an external governance review recommended its removal due to its ineffectiveness.
The president at the time, Alan Ehrenholz, told The Ubyssey the elimination of the Oversight Committee would enhance “connection between the executive and Council.”
Critics of the removal at the time were concerned that this would result in the removal of executive oversight. The new internal governance review indicates that it essentially did.
Max Holmes, the chair of the Governance Review Committee in the fall until he stepped down to serve as the AMS’s elections administrator, told The Ubyssey in November 2022 that the elimination of the committee led to Council having to, as a whole, hold executives accountable.
“It’s difficult for a 40-person body to have consensus on the feedback it might give for oversight of executives,” Holmes said.
The new Executive Performance & Accountability Committee will have seven members — the non-executive chairs of standing committees plus the potential for additional non-executive members of Council — and the Speaker of Council will serve as the chair.
“This is just to make sure that AMS Council is acting like more of a board in terms of helping executives do their job a little better,” AMS President Eshana Bhangu said at Council on March 22. Bhangu took over as chair of the Governance Review Committee after Holmes stepped down.
According to the new code changes, the Executive Performance & Accountability Committee will be responsible for collecting and hearing feedback on AMS executives, bringing concerns to Council when appropriate and making recommendations to Council on executive performance.
The committee also has the power to bring a motion to remove an executive from office, in accordance with Section V1, Article 11 of AMS Code.
Bhangu said the elimination of the bonus system would set the new committee apart from the defunct Oversight Committee, which she said became “extremely toxic” and political back in the day.
“To mitigate some of those concerns, the Speaker of Council is going to be involved,” Bhangu said at Council on March 29. “And there’s a proper mechanism to gather feedback from the people the executives work with which are the permanent staff, student staff and other members of the organization instead of it just being random people on Council.”
“We’re definitely not repeating mistakes from the past,” Bhangu said. “I’m very confident that this executive performance and accountability committee will be effective and be different.”