As part of coverage of the ASSU, The Daily will be posting highlights from the week’s Senate meeting.

• ASSU executive vice president Logan Richard ’15 began his executive report with a review of the sexual assault task force town hall, saying that the Execs “found [themselves] at odds with being able to create a safe space” and that the Execs will no longer hold town halls of that structure. Richard also announced that the executive cabinet is going through training around sexual assault with Angela Exson from the Sexual Assault and Relationship Abuse (SARA) office. He also announced a new initiative called “Middle Med.” “The idea around Middle Med is to provide resources for mental health and well-being in the time (at night and in the place [dorms] where students will be most likely to access them,” said ASSU president Elizabeth Woodson. On a note related to the campus-wide discourse about sexual assault, the Middle Med staff would not be a confidential resource and therefore would be required to report sexual crimes to the Title IX Office.
• The Senate passed a bill authored by Senate treasurer Eric Theis that prohibits the Senate from allocating funds from the Programming and Community Service Fund to cover an expenditure that has already occurred. The bill will come into effect Oct. 23.
• Finally, the Senate unanimously passed a bill to “implement a soft cap allocation scheme for general fee funding.” The bill was authored by Jackson Beard, chair of appropriations. The bill places a soft cap for ASSU funding allocation per quarter for the 2014-2015 year. The caps, which are percentages of the general fee, are 25.5 percent, 36.0 percent and 38.5 percent for fall, winter and spring quarters, respectively. A 25.5 percent soft cap translates as a $90,000 soft limit for allocating funds. The soft cap bill is in response to the last year’s financial mishap in which the general fee funds were depleted early into spring quarter.