Curator bill passes Mo. Senate
Published April 4, 2008
A bill to give the student representative to the UM system Board of Curators a vote passed the Missouri Senate on Thursday in a 30-2 vote.
The bill would require that after congressional redistricting in 2010, when Missouri is expected to lose one district because of shifts in population, the ninth voting seat on the Board of Curators would be filled by a student.
The Board of Curators is the governing body for the four campuses in the UM system.
The Missouri Constitution requires that the board have nine members, and the Missouri Revised Statutes requires that no more than one member should live in each congressional district.
“I think it’s an important step,” Student Representative to the Board of Curators Tony Luetkemeyer said. “I think that given the fact that students have increasingly been carrying the burden of the cost of supporting the institution, it’s important that the students have an actual vote on the Board of Curators. I think that’s only fair.”
The board’s student representative serves as a nonvoting ex-officio member.
Bills providing for a student representative in the past didn’t take redistricting into account, and instead just mandated that the student representative be given a vote.
Previous attempts had never passed in the Senate, only in the House.
Sen. Chuck Graham, D-Columbia, sponsored the bill in the Senate. He said he’s confident that it will pass for two reasons.
First, he said, a version of the bill had passed in the House twice before.
“Both times it stalled in the Senate,” he said.
Second, he said, the bill has the backing of House leadership. Rep. Bryan Pratt, R-Blue Springs, who is the House speaker pro tem, sponsored a similar bill in the House.
“I think we’ve got a very good chance,” Graham said.
Earlier this year, the Associated Students of the University of Missouri announced that the “student curator” bill would be a priority for the organization, which lobbies for UM system students in Jefferson City.
ASUM Legislative Director Craig Stevenson said he’s optimistic that the bill will pass in the House.
He said that members of the House Higher Education Committee had expressed interest in the bill, but wanted to “wait and see” how the bill fared in Senate.
“At this point, it looks like we do have the votes in the committee,” Stevenson said.
Stevenson said the chairman of the House Higher Education Committee, Rep. Gayle Kingery, R-Poplar Bluff, had opposed student representative bills in the past.
Kingery could not be reached for comment.
“Rep. Kingery is a really good guy, and he personally doesn’t support the bill, but I don’t see him acting as a roadblock and stopping the bill,” Stevenson said.
Luetkemeyer said that he believes a majority of the House supports the bill.
“Assuming that we can get it out of the committee, I think that it will pass,” he said.
Luetkemeyer said the Board of Curators had been opposed to the legislation in the past, but only when the bill didn’t include the redistricting language.
Now, he said, it’s difficult to say how the curators would vote because the language of the bill is “drastically different.”