Loyola’s Student Government Association’s bylaws have recently undergone a makeover to bring them up to date.

The SGA bylaws are a set of rules that govern the legislative branch of the organization. The previous bylaws were from the late 1990s and had references to things that no longer exist or aren’t currently used, said Edward Seyler, senator at large and economics senior.

“They are basically an agreement among the senators concerning how business is to be conducted,” Seyler said.

The reason the bylaws became inefficient was because a rash of amendments to the constitution were made two years ago, and the senate forgot to make accommodating changes to the bylaws, Seyler said. Because the constitution and the bylaws are the two governing documents of SGA, they need to be in sync in order to run an efficient senate.

The major addition to the bylaws is a new way to discuss the agenda at meetings. Now, rather than having the floor open to any issue that constituents may have brought up to their senator that week, SGA plans the agenda the day before the meeting. This allows senators time to consult with constituents about what is to be voted on, Seyler said.

“The changes will probably give senators a better opportunity to discuss agenda items with their constituents and will otherwise clarify how the Senate should proceed in certain situations,” Seyler said.

In the past, committees were split up differently, and there were many detailed specifications about the role of subcommittees, which SGA no longer uses. There were also grammatical and spelling problems.

“These changes should tie in with our efforts at committee reform—currently committees are widely under-utilized, and we believe that committees could do a better job at investigating matters in their own jurisdictions,” Seyler said.

SGA started to look into these changes because members noticed discrepancies between the constitution and bylaws.

“There are numerous references in the Constitution to the bylaws, and I thought it strange that the senate was conducting business without even acknowledging the existence of the bylaws,” Seyler said.

Seyler also said one of the other problems that came up during the revision of the bylaws was that the old bylaws were still intact but were not actually being used. To deal with this, the senate was functioning solely off of Robert’s Rules of Order, a set of guidelines for parliamentary procedure used across the United States.

These new bylaws were passed at the Oct. 11 Senate meeting and are now in effect.

“They reflect the way that we actually do business in 2011,” Seyler said.

Kristen Himmelberg can be reached at [email protected]