Minutes of Staff Council Meeting
June 7, 2007

*APPROVED*

In Attendance: Joseph Bialek, Sandy Bycenski, Toby Davis, Navae Fenwick, Chris Gentes, Merrilyn Lewis, Maureen Litwin, Trish Mailler, Jen Matos, Barbara Pliska, Sara Punsky, Rick Rubin, Sam Rush, Bill Sheehan, Janet Spongberg, Becca Washut, Kathy Yarnell

Absent: Stacey Anasazi, Lynda DallaPegorara, Alicia Guidiotti, Karin LaBarge, Sabrina Marsh, Kathryn Messier, Ken Molnar, Pat Rist, Jenny Silver, Art Usher, John Zaikowski

Election of new officers:

• Rick Rubin – Chair
• Sandy Bycenski – Vice Chair
• Barbara Pliska – Treasurer
• Sara Punsky – Co-Secretary
• Becca Washut – Co-Secretary

Assignment to Committees:

• All went around the table and determined to which committee they would be assigned
• Please see 07-08 Roster for assignments
• Rick will e-mail absent members to see which committee they’ll be on

Items from last Steering Committee meeting

• Presidential appointees
• How long are the terms?
• Currently open-ended
• Should we set a term limit?
• Archival of materials from past staff councils
• What happens to those documents?
• Should we put them in order to send to Archives?
• Could we use the room where the Steering Committee meets to organize these documents?
• Chair position
• Should be auto-forwarded from Staff Council
• Sandy will look into this

Council policies

• How do the new officers know what to do or where to get information?
• They should ask for advice from the last people holding that position

Committees

• All committees should meet once a month
• Minutes from these meetings should be passed along to the co-secretaries so they can include them in Staff Council Meeting minutes
• Merrilyn will be scheduling the next meeting of the Personnel Policy Meeting

• Sandy will make arrangements for our next meeting location.
• She will also update and e-mail the new roster, and will include committee assignments

Activities Committee Update

• Bird watching event – Thur, May 31 from 6-9 a.m.
• A great turn-out of 25 people
• They spotted 38 different species of birds and a beaver
• Capen Garden Talk – Mon, June 11 at 12 p.m.
• Bring your bag lunch
• Movie on Burton Lawn – Fri, July 27 at dusk
• Showing “Happy Feet” and serving drinks and snow cones for a fee
• Trip to Six Flags – Sat, Aug. 18 from 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
• Bus leaving Ainsworth parking lot at 9 a.m.
• $25 per person
• Rick will send out a poster to put up in your offices
• Possible future activities:
• Mountain Day – apple crisp instead of ice cream
• Apple picking in the fall
• Ice skating on Paradise Pond

Personnel Policy Committee Update

• Parking
• Have we heard anything new about it?
• There haven’t been any updates
• The form for the 07-08 parking permits is available online
• All information concerning the new parking regulations is also online
• No printed information has come directly from Public Safety
• Merrilyn will check on it
• Transfer of funds
• Bill made a motion to transfer $2,800 from the Staff Council budget to the Activities Committee budget
• If this isn’t done, we’ll lose the money and it won’t roll to the next fiscal year
• The motion was passed without discussion

Steering Committee Update

• Human Resources workshops
• Abida Adnan sent an e-mail to Sam with the summary of those workshops

Diversity Committee Update

• There are no updates at this time

Starting a Green Committee?

• Should we start a Green Committee out of Staff Council, or should we have a Staff Council representative on the campus-wide Green Committee?
• We should invite Gary and/or Todd to one of our meetings
• Janet also brought up the topic of environmentally friendly lawnmowers
• Bernadette Giblin ’04 is a local woman who uses these and takes care of faculty member’s lawns

For the next meeting

• Next meeting scheduled for Tues, July 12 at 2 p.m.
• Bring any ideas for a project that we would like to complete during our tenure
• Something that we want to accomplish for the staff
• These ideas can also be e-mailed to Rick