Senate held its first meeting and among the first order of business was to make important position appointments.

Wednesday Sept. 23 at 2 p.m. marked the start of the new 2015-2016 ASCC Senate.

The first motion for the senate was to approve the appointment of 27 members of the executive cabinet as a block, which is all together.

After that came the appointment of the senate majority and minority leaders; for which freshmen and sophomore senators divided and appointed Jaqueline Martinez as the minority leader and Saul Lopez as the majority leader.

Among those appointments was the selection for a new ASCC Senate party whip, a position which entails being a liaison between the ASCC Cabinet branch of student government and the senate.

ASCC Senator Gloria Sedano is now the new senate’s party whip.

Sedano sees her position as a way to bridge communication between senate and underrepresented students. She was also assigned to be a part of the rules and administration committee, a committee that will seek to amend the ASCC Senate’s constitution.

Sedano said, “The constitution bylaws has a lot of language that is outdated it only uses ‘he’ […] there are changes that need to be made.”

She also wants to make changes to the ASCC Awards Banquet.

Students expressed their issues with the awards banquet to her, so she plans to help fix the problem and have the awards be more inclusive.

The appointment for Sergeant at Arms was the only position that required voting. Senators Jerome Baker, Alex Cervantes, and Benjamin Gonzalez accepted the nomination for the position and had to leave the room as fellow senators voted.

In the end it was Gonzalez who won the position with only a one vote difference from senator Cervantes.

Gonzales expressed his excitement over being the winner, “I didn’t know about the position but once I heard the position description I knew it was for me.”

The other position that was appointed without any competition was the senate president pro tempore which was given to Senator Joseph Fierro.

New Chief Justice Trent Coates was approved by senate and so were four other associate justices, another position approval went to Jada Blanshard who is now the clerk for senate minutes.

After all the appointments and agenda items were finished the first ASCC Senate meeting ended after about 1hour and 30 minutes.

After presiding over his first official meeting Oyarzabal said, “It’s different and very demanding you have to stay alert. It [the meeting] was good, efficient it wasn’t as long as I planed on. I look forward to working with everyone.”