A student filed a proposal to impeach a member of the Student Activities Council.
Sen. David Hall (music) provided a motion Oct. 24 to file impeachment against Madelynn Buckman, vice president of Student Activities Council, a branch of Student Government Association that plans student events. Hall accused Buckman of breaching faith and intending to misuse funds, both of which are bylaw violations.
The accusations are in regard to the use of funds for Free Movie Night, an event wherein students were provided with free tickets to Harkins Theater in Bricktown.
Hall said he was concerned after seeing a post inquiring about Free Movie Night in the “OCU” Facebook group. Kenzie VanZee, SAC executive member, posted that there was no intention to continue the event at Harkins.
“As of right now, we do not have a free movie night planned this semester,” she wrote.
VanZee later amended her statement to address the possible use of funds.
“I would just like to point out that when I’m saying ‘Free Movie Night, I’m talking about the off-campus free movie nights,” she wrote. “In regards to the ‘line-items budget presented to senators in steering committee explicitly list movie nights for this semester’ I assume the funding went to buying the rights to the movies on the quad. SAC still does movie night they are just not the free movies nights that this post is about.”
Since SGA money was budgeted for Free Movie Night, not hosting the event is a breached trust with senators and the student body, as well as implied the potential of misusing funds, Hall said.
“There is a trust with the student body that we’re going to do what we say we’re going to do and spend your money in a certain way,” he said.
The SGA budget allocates $7,500 for two Free Movie Night events.
The first Free Movie Night budget was spent on a screening of Ocean’s 8 Sept. 20 on the quad, Buckman said.
Buckman said she’d like to do the second movie night at Cinemark Tinseltown USA but is having trouble getting in contact with their officials.
“If Tinseltown doesn’t get back to me, we’re just going to do our own really big movie night,” she said.
Buckman said she doesn’t think she made false promises.
“I said from the get-go when I was elected into this position last semester that Free Movie Night was going to be a lot different,” she said.
She said Hall assumed that Free Movie Nights would be the same as in the past, and the situation wasn’t handled well.
“I wish he had come and spoke to me about this because I’m kind of confused as to how I misused funds when they did go to Free Movie Night,” Buckman said. “I don’t think it was approached the proper way.”
Hall said he felt pressured to report the allegation quickly because the SGA bylaws require an allegation to be filed within 48 hours of discovery.
“We can’t spend a week looking into it,” he said. “I have 48 hours, so my hands are kind of tied. I have to do this now.”
Student senators now have to decide how to handle the proposal. The decision to hear the case or not will likely be made after Thursday night’s SGA meeting, Hall said.
Hall said he doesn’t think impeachment is necessary. He said SAC needs to do a better job of clarifying exactly what Free Movie Night is.
Bylaws should be improved, regardless of the outcome of the proposal, Hall said.
“Hopefully something that comes out of this is that you don’t have just 48 hours for an allegation to happen as long as you have documentation of it,” Hall said.
Who is Buckmann? It just said Buckmann out of nowhere with no introduction or first name!
Madelynn Buckman, they named her in the first paragraph.
They edited it then because it did say Nadelynn Yoder first.
I find senator Halls idea of a misuse of funds worrisome. It is true that there was a line item on the budget for free movie nights, but the budget that had those kind items was not passed. I sure wish some of our SGA members would remember that they decided not to pass the budget in which SAC had the money they were asking for. Seems to me that the real person we should be asking questions of is the senator that lead the charge to blow the budget up.
“Hall said he doesn’t think impeachment is necessary,” then why did he take this action to impeach the VP? If he stated that he doesn’t think it’s necessary, then why wasn’t a different claim made to bring up the transparency of “what Free Movie Night is”???
Sounds like ole D. Hall is fishing and trying to push an agenda that is NOT in the interest of the student body.
Also, Under Article VI Section 1 of the Bylaws a violation has to occur. The fact that Senator Hall thinks something may or may not occur is a sufficient reason to file charges. The original facebook post was made over two weeks ago, and this article clearly says that that is when Hall became “concerned” about the situation. These two reasons alone should be suffiecent enough for Cheif Justice Roth to throw the charges out. Additionally, Senator Hall should also know that there is a reason for the 48 hour rule. That reason is to avoid pettiness and blackmail. If I were senator Hall I would be more concerned with chrges being filed against myself for a breach of faith for consistantly trying to subvert different members of the OCU SGA exec and filing charges tht are unfounded and created out some misplaced malice towards VP of SAC Yoder.
*The fact that Senator Hall thinks something may or may not occur is not a sufficient reason to file charges.
I’d say the big problem here is that this isn’t the kind of “Free Movie Night” the students want. We want choice in what we are seeing and we want to see movies that are CURRENT. Where is the choice, where is the accountability? And where is the money? There’s no way that that Ocean’s 8 screening was $7,500. If it was, that’s a gross misuse of funds. We want our monthly free movie nights at the cinema again. It’s the only student event that the majority of us actually look forward to and I promise you that the students would much rather see the whole budget blown on a true free movie night than on anything else.