After a controversial Associated Students of Washington State University Vancouver election season last spring and a rare special election this fall, the student body recently elected Vince Chavez and Holly Ta to serve as the 2018/19 ASWSUV president and vice president. In this interview with The VanCougar, Chavez and Ta speak about their initial reactions to winning and future plans for their time in office.
Q: What was your initial feeling when you discovered you won the election?
Vince: “I was really excited. It happened a lot sooner than I was expecting it to.”
Holly: “I felt the same. I was very overwhelmed, very grateful, very honored and blessed to be elected. It was amazing all the support that we had.”
Q: Holly, did you ever imagine running for vice president in the past?
Holly: “Honestly, I have never imagined running for any student government position. I didn’t realize that I was a natural leader until my mentor and coach persuaded me to the position. Being elected to vice-president is definitely something I have grown very passionate about. It’s definitely one thing where I can see myself growing and becoming a better person. All the other small leadership positions I held on campus helped me become a better leader and provided me with more experience and connections.”
Vince: “I think it’s surprising that she [Holly] didn’t see herself in a position like this, because I remember when I found out Davina couldn’t run with me last year. I was kind of at a loss. Having a strong VP is critical for me to move forward with a good conscience. As soon as I found out that Holly wasn’t graduating, this huge light bulb just lit up. I’m glad she decided to join me.”
Q: Did the two of you have plans in place incase you didn’t win?
Vince: “I think we agreed to celebrate regardless of win or loss. I knew that I would still be involved in whatever capacity I was allowed to be. I knew that I wouldn’t leave the campus or distance myself. I knew that if we did lose, I wanted to work closely with the new president in making sure that my experience and concerns I’ve heard from students was transferred to them and assist in any capacity I could.”
Holly: “I agree with that. I would definitely have still been involved for different events and support other organizations at full capacity.”
Q: What are your first action items and plans?
Vince: “Our first agenda item as president and vice president is to hire two senators and the executive staff position of community and outreach.”
Holly: “Another thing that we’re working on is the five year plan in the Senate. We also really want to do team bonding and team training to create more unity and cooperation in the Senate team. I feel like there’s been a lot of disconnect between the team and I want to be able to create a safe space and environment for them to have heartfelt conversations and find ways to connect with each other. Having the mindset and remembering why they were elected as senators and remember why we are serving the students.”
Q: What are your goals for the future?
Vince: “After laying down the foundation for this five year plan, one of our plans is putting the ASWSUV website under the main WSUV website [the current website resides on ORGSYNC]. We also want to start looking at where students think are the hazardous areas on our campus. We want to get students knowing about what we’re doing with the lighting project and that we’re being responsive to their needs. I just read that the Honors program is being defunded by 10 thousand dollars. We want to talk to Mel [WSU Vancouver Chancellor Mel Netzhammer] to see what we can do to get that funded again.”
Holly: “Vince and I definitely have very similar plans and goals for WSU and for the future in general. We just want to establish collaboration between consecutive administrations and among students to create more efficiency and increase transparency within student government. Another thing we want to implement is an easily accessible community calendar for all students so that the calendar we [student government] has on cougsync and the WSUV calendar will be merged. And helping with textbook finance support. One of our goals was to create collaboration with the library.” Vince: “With the textbook assistance program, we want to be able to rent out books to students at a very reasonable price. With the money that we will be receiving from this program, we want to invest that into more textbooks so we can rent it out to more students. We want to collaborate with the library for a storage project as well so students can come here [to the library] and check out their textbooks.”