Hernandez hard at work

Hernandez hard at work

OUSA President Francisco Hernandez has released his first quarterly report, containing a detailed breakdown of the progress he has made toward his plethora of campaign pledges. The report, which stretches to 15 pages, has been kindly summarised by Critic in this 265-word article.

The first five pages include Fran’s report on the day-to-day aspects of his job. The last 10 pages comprise his pledges (of which there were 96) broken into five categories – “Active Engagement,” “Provide Relevant Services,” “Increased Accountability,” “Financial Responsibility,” and “Environmental Sustainability.”

Fran considered his pledges to be around one-third complete. After quibbling with his scoring system and a couple of his claims, Critic put the figure at around 30 per cent. Significant progress had been made on environmental sustainability, with about 40 per cent of pledges delivered; and on active engagement, with around 35 per cent delivered. Finances were also healthy, with OUSA looking certain to run a budget surplus.

The category with the least progress was accountability, at around 23 per cent complete. Most of these pledges concerned political campaigns and engagement with the union movement, areas that will presumably now be addressed by the appointment of a permanent Campaigns Officer.

One of Fran’s setbacks has been the abandonment of plans to create a student council which would have “broadened the OUSA governance structure” by introducing a second body beneath the exec. Clearly not a fan of the whole “collective responsibility” thing, Fran laid the blame for this failure at his fellow execcies’ feet, speculating that they were opposed to the scheme because they “didn’t want to share their power.”
This article first appeared in Issue 6, 2013.
Posted 4:40pm Sunday 7th April 2013 by Sam McChesney.