University Council held its monthly meeting on Tuesday, March 10 at 3 p.m. in the Union to discuss a number of topics and motions to recommend to president Scarborough.

“UC is a deliberative and representative body that makes recommendations to the President on long-range planning and informs decisions on other substantive matters that affect the well-being and common interests of the university community,” according to their website.

During the meeting, they discussed the recent proposal from Undergraduate Student Government to make the general service fee charged to all students more transparent. The proposal is now owned by UC after it had passed through USG. Council member, Nathan Mortimer met with USG and worked with them to make this fee more transparent. “If you’re most interested in transparency of the use of the money, I can demonstrate that effective July 1, through county records,” Mortimer said at the meeting. After that he continued how that could be accommodated in any way into students Zipline accounts.

Some members of the council had concerns about how this fee would actually look on the website. Whether it would be a drop-down box or automatically listed with students tuition and fees.The motion and report were made available to council members so their responses could be discussed at a later date.

After that motion was addressed, Mortimer then gave an in-depth report on budget and finance addressing the university’s audited financial statements, foundation financial statements and research foundation statements for the 2014 fiscal year. He went through the statements looking at revenues, expenses, assets, liabilities, and more characteristics of them to see where the money is going.

This provides a baseline to compare the different units on campus. So far they’ve analyzed Dining Services, Parking Services, and telecommunications but “there are a lot more to come,” Mortimer said. “In my opinion we are in a position to understand the finances better than what we were in the past for budget and finance. Now we kind of see how it all fits together. So now we can have informed input where-as last year maybe we had input that wasn’t informed, but this year it will be informed input with higher knowledge of the dollars.” Mortimer said to the council.

Next, the council addressed the motion from the Talent Development and Human Resources committee to propose a new “Leave Bank Policy” and recommendation for that The University of Akron implement the policy within nine days of proposal. A leave bank is when faculty or staff save unused leave days and they accrue. After a vote, the motion and recommendation passed 17-3 to move forward to the president.

The Talent Development and Human Resources committee then offered another proposal that would reccomend a plan in order to accommodate departments that have retiring faculty members. This plan dealt with succession and replacement of faculty members so there would not be sudden major changes to departments when retirement inevitably takes place. This motion passed as well with a vote of 12-3.

The meeting concluded with the council reviewing their Year End Timeline which highlights deadlines for submission of new UC members, UC satisfaction survey, and the roster for the 2015-16 UC membership roster.

The next UC meeting will take place on April 7, at 3 p.m. in the Union room 312.