All future Student Union Senate meetings will now be livestreamed, following the passage of a bill Tuesday, Oct. 9.

The bill has been discussed since November 2017 when sophomore senator Tyrin Truong first introduced the idea. It will be put into action as soon as the logistics are settled. SU president and senior Grace Egbo said that there was much discussion around the issue.

“There were pretty heated discussions on both sides as to why people were either for or against it,” Egbo said. “I know some reasons a lot of people were for [because] it will help accessibility.”

Truong said that he believes although the bill was not easy to pass, it was important to the student body as it will increase transparency in SU.

“Before I ran for Senate, I always felt like Student Union wasn’t accountable enough. It wasn’t transparent enough,” Truong said. “I feel like this was a step in the right direction. I went in knowing that it would receive a lot of opposition, but my main thing was that our job as senators is to break down barriers for our constituents, not make excuses for their existence.”

According to Speaker of the Senate junior Olivia Williams, some of the controversy over the presentation of the bill came from confusion over how they would implement the process.

“I would say, [it wasn’t that] people didn’t really want livestream; people just felt like they should have put more pieces together in terms of the logistics,” Williams said. “Initially, a few of the nitty-gritty details, in terms of who would be in charge of this…weren’t exactly ironed out, but I’m sure that will happen in the upcoming weeks.”

According to Truong, as per the discussion last Tuesday, SU will work with the Harvey Media Center to get camera equipment. They plan to livestream the meetings through YouTube.

“We’ll post a link on the SU Facebook page so people [can] access it as it’s happening,” Truong said.

One of the biggest concerns about the livestreaming was ensuring that individuals who come to meetings still have their rights to privacy. Truong noted that a clause was added to the final resolution saying that if two-thirds of the senate body votes to cut the livestream off, the livestream will be cut off.

Although senate meetings are open to the student body, Troung emphasized that not all students find them easily accessible.

“One of the Senators made an argument saying if students were that interested, they could make that eight-minute trek from the South 40. I replied by saying that statement is really problematic for a bunch of reasons, the main reason being that students with disabilities may have problems accessing Simon late at night,” Truong said.

Williams said that she believes the the bill will be productive in helping to increase SU’s transparency.

“I think it will be a really good accountability measure for senate,” Williams said. “I think the intentions behind it were really great, and I think they’re just a step up towards making us more accessible.”