The Undergraduate Student Government Tempe Senate has elected Dominic Frattura to serve as senate president for the 2019-2020 school year.
Frattura, currently a senator for the W. P. Carey School of Business and a junior majoring in business, was chosen by the newly sworn-in senate over Nicole Morote and Niccolo Giambanco.
As part of his platform, Frattura seeks to make the USGT senate more representative of the student body and improve communications between the directors, senators and interns.
Frattura said that one of his plans to make USGT more representative is holding caucuses which will be "completely open to the student body and are actually going to be providing more transparency into what the senate is doing."
Transparency has been an issue in the past for USGT. Joshua Blinkoff, the previous senate president, failed to post agendas to the public on multiple occasions.
During the senate discussion regarding the three candidates, Ryan Magel, a senator for The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a junior majoring in political science, voiced his support for Frattura.
"Personally, I feel as though Senator Frattura is by far the more qualified candidate," Magel said. "Having had conversations with him previously, he has solid plans on how to achieve all of these things, bringing us back to a time when we were truly a representative organization."
The new executive board was also sworn in at the meeting.
Read more: USG and GPSA elections end with lingering senate vacancies
Hanna Salem, the new president and a junior majoring in public service and public policy, echoed Frattura's goal to improve communication between the various parts of USGT.
In order to accomplish this, Salem plans on treating the senate clerk as a director instead of as a senator.
"They will be working closely with the chief of staff and the internal operations director to be planning bonding events, trainings and communicating with the directors and the senators about what's going on on both sides of USG," Salem said.
Additionally, Salem said she would like directors to attend senate meetings, and senators to attend director meetings.
"We want to make sure that everyone is informed ... just making it more of a cohesive body, and making sure that everyone's having fun and creating really long lasting relationships so that they're excited to come and serve students," Salem said.
Frattura said that he is happy with the work done by the past year's senate and looks forward to continuing to improve USGT.
"I'm very excited for all the new senators that came on and very proud to have served in the former Senate," Frattura said. "I think that we did a great job last year. The main thing that I would like to implement is to make sure that ... USG as a collective body is functioning to its best ability."
Reach the reporter at krquaran@asu.edu and follow @kiaraquaranta on Twitter.
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