The council meeting on February 13, 2018 was sparsely populated, as both President Wasylyshyn and Executive Director Jodi Campbell were absent with regrets (meaning with prior notice that they wouldn’t be there.)  Councillor Robin Bleich was also absent due to an illness, but fortunately, Councillor Adrew Gray, who’d also indicated he’d be absent with regrets had no regrets at all, as he was present.

With only five Councillors present and, as it turns out, the meeting contents largely uncontroversial, the meeting sped by fairly quickly and with little incident.

Of course, fairly quickly is a relative term, as the largest section of the meeting was taken up by a presentation from AUSU’s contracted auditors, KRP, where they presented the financial statements of AU.  In short, they gave AUSU’s accounting and financial management practices a clean bill of health, going so far as to note that several management practices had improved over the past year.  Many disclaimers were issued about how they did not test every transaction, or how, even if they had, they might not be able to find evidence of fraud if there was some occurring, but what they did do found no evidence of any sort of malpractice or fraud.

Their presentation of the audit included noted that a few adjustments were made to the books, such as The Voice Magazine’s website being noted as an asset rather than just an expense, and some adjustments for end of year accrual balances.  They also noted that The Voice Magazine ended the year with a slight surplus, AUSU Council with a slight deficit, but a much lower one than what was projected.  After the presentation and the representative from KRP left, the frim was reappointed with little discussion.   As noted, none of the proposed adjustments to policy were contentious, being mostly minor adjustments, and went through quickly and quietly.

The reports went by in similar manner, but it was noted that AUSU is working on adjusting their course evaluation forms to be more useful to members, and that AUSU’s presented considerations to AU for the 2018-2019 draft AU budget were quickly rejected as not being feasible based on the time or information that AU currently had.  The meeting ended uneventfully  at about 6:30pm, only an hour after it started.  The next meeting is a special meeting to announce the election results, and will be held on March 8, 2018 at 5:30pm.