The AUSA Senate voted in a new senior senator to fill a vacated position at its meeting last Tuesday.

The only application submitted to the AUSA, new senator George Stockum, was voted-in almost unanimously. Stockum is the pledge educator at the Chi Phi fraternity and also helped to found United for Isreal with Leo Simonovich.

One of Stockum’s platforms for the 2004-2005 Senate is to help create better synergy between the greek and non-greek students.

“I recognize that sometimes non-greek and greek students don’t socialize with each other that much, I’d like to help bridge that gap,” he said.

Stockum was studying abroad when applications had to be in for the senior senator position, and received overwhelmingly positive reactions from current senate members on his induction.

The Senate also passed a bill allowing more money to be allocated for pre-game hockey parties and tabled one bill which may raise the student activities fee.

Bill 6A was brought to the floor by Vice President Yusuf Malik and passed with support from the majority of senators. The bill passed would allow Senate to allocate $400 to two pre-game parties for DU hockey. The first pre-game party is scheduled for February 11 when DU will host Wisconsin.

The second is for the final DU home game on March 4. DU will host top rival Colorado College. This game will be the last chance for graduating seniors to cheer on their team in Magness Arena. Not to mention it will be the last CC game of this season.

The money would go toward paying for a DJ at the pre-game parties. Publicity then would be provided by another student organization that would co-sponsor the parties.

During the discussion on the passing of the bill sophomore Senator Lauren Goldman asked if there were plans to have pre-game at other DU sporting events. Senator Cooper responded to the concern by stating that the attendance as of now is higher at the hockey games. AUSA Senate is able to reach more students at the hockey games than at the other sporting event as of right now.

“We want to focus on the bigger sports and then spread to the smaller teams,” said President Max Goldberg.

Bill 6A was passed with support from a majority of the senators.

Sen. Conry introduced the next bill which proposed to raise the student activities fee.

Bill 5A would raise the fee by $5, setting it at $75. This raise was brought on by RTD increasing its fee to DU. The RTD portion of the fee will be increased to $16.25. The rest of the money from the fee is given to student activities such as AUSA and DUPB.

Many of the senators wanted to find out how the undergraduate student body felt about this increase. Senator Conry asked senators to speak with their peers and return to the next meeting with feedback. Bill 5A was tabled until next Tuesday’s meeting.