At odds in the SGA

They come from different parties and have clashed over cheating in elections, SGA policy and their respective takes on the Jewish religion, but SGA President Steve Glickman and Vice President of Finance Andrew Steinberg insist they get along fine.

"I think we have a good dynamic of people on the executive board," Glickman said. 

Though Steinberg ran for office with the Unite UMD Party, which was fined for cheating last spring, and Glickman led the ONE Party, whose candidates currently hold most of the seats on the Student Government Association's executive board, both say the pre-election partisanship no longer exists.

But several incidents this semester have suggested some difficulty in keeping the peace. Glickman expressed concerns as Steinberg led an audit of the SGA's budget last month, and tensions between the two executives flared two weeks ago in a debate over funding the SGA.

Steinberg said his introduction of student group audits was designed to ensure accountability among student leaders, but when the audits took aim at the SGA, Glickman questioned the finance committee's authority to investigate the group, according to the audit report.

Samuel Mukiibi, the audit's principal investigator, said in the report that Glickman also raised questions about whether the audit was necessary in the first place.
Glickman denied this account.

"I did support the audit," he said. "I thought it was a good idea."

But when Glickman vied earlier this month to allocate the SGA an additional $6,300 to its $44,178 budget, disagreements over the organization's finances swelled once again.

Steinberg represented the consensus of the finance committee when he argued that the $60,000 available to the SGA through university-mandated funds would suffice.

Glickman said the reserve funding is not supposed to serve the purpose of holding SGA events, while Steinberg said it is and any leftover funds outside of this pool should go to other student groups.

"I take my responsibility to students, the student body and the trust that they've put in me to serve them very seriously," Steinberg said. "I see myself as a check on Steve, and I'm accountable to the student body. ... I'm an independently elected official."

A long-winded debate in the SGA's second-to-last meeting of the semester ensued.

Glickman said he didn't see this as a conflict.

"I think Andrew's actually been doing a really good job," he said. "I applauded him on the work he did on the secondary process."

North Hill legislator Natalia Cuadra-Saez said their debate at this meeting wasn't in the interest of the student body, but rather an argument about the minutiae of SGA rules. At the meeting, she noted the large number of legislators' nameplates  were turned around — a signal the legislature  is ready to move on and vote.

"That's the biggest example I've seen all semester of bickering over a rule over semantics, basically," she said.

But Glickman said it was all basic procedure.

"That was actually a really short debate on the appeal," he said. "That meeting was pretty typical."

Other brushes between the two skewed slightly more personal. Glickman left a student fee meeting before a crucial vote to go home for Rosh Hashanah, a holiday celebrating the new year in Judaism. But Steinberg said Glickman also scheduled an executive meeting on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, when Steinberg was attending services.

Despite these incidents, SGA spokesman Joel Cohen said, overall, Glickman and Steinberg have worked well together over the course of the semester.

"I think stuff comes up between anyone in any organization throughout the semester, throughout the year, at school and the real world," Cohen said. "But everything I've seen — you know, they get along fairly well."

aisaacs at umdbk dot com