The Undergraduate Student Government voted and swore in senior David Hackworthy as the new West Summit Neighborhood Committee Adviser at its meeting Sunday night. 

Hackworthy feels that there needs to be more compromise between students and the neighborhood. He hopes to obtain understanding or conversation between students and neighbors.

“As a senator and as a resident of the neighborhood, I want to try to work with the neighborhood and not necessarily against them,” Hackworthy said. “At the same time, I would like to represent the students in a way that says ‘we are students who put forward various efforts in trying to take care of this neighborhood.’”

Vice President of Public Relations Jared Scharpen talked about a current sign initiative that will encourage better student-neighborhood relations.

USG members will be walking around Tuesday night to ask students in the neighborhood to sponsor and support the sign initiative. The signs are a friendly reminder to students to keep their volume down to a minimum when walking around the neighborhood.

The council also approved the Triathlon Club. Sophomore Noel Naughton thinks that it is a great sport and would like more people to know about it.

“What most people don’t realize is that there is a whole range of triathlons,” Naughton said. “The idea of the club is to try to raise awareness about the sport of triathlon and to help people realize their goal of being able to do one.”

Vice President of Financial Affairs Quinn Abraham discussed a conference request for five members from Paintball Club to attend a paintball tournament in Chicago. The request was for $1,800 and approved for $1,250.

Junior Class President Collin Kearney expressed the university’s need for better signage on campus. The class initiative is to get clearer signs in order for guests to get around campus easier. Kearney mentions that the new initiative would take about four to six years to accomplish because of costs, research and branding discussions.

Ninety-one club budgets were approved for the fall at the meeting. The USG budget for clubs was larger this year than the last. Abraham said there were 21 more new budget requests for this semester compared to thespring semester. The overall budget was maxed out and allocated to all the clubs.

Abraham explained why some club budgets were cut.

“I would say one of the most common reasons was that a lot of clubs did not have all their members registered on Murphy Online, and that is all we have to go off of for us to know how many members are in each club,” Abraham said. “We also go off of a $25 per person food charge.”

Abraham said the other reason was that some clubs requested funds for equipment purchases. These requests will be directed to a different pool of funding designed specifically for equipment purchases.

Scharine explained that there were budget cuts in order to reduce money that is rolled over to the next semester.

“Our goal as USG is to make sure that we give clubs enough money to run their events and enrich the community,” he said. “We also want them to be almost close to zero in every semester so that they are using this semester’s student activity fee on this semester’s students.”

Anna Tu can be reached at tu978399@stthomas.edu.