Senators raised papers reading “DITTO” when agreeing to statements said regarding Meza-Roa. Ella Banken//AS Review
By Soleil de Zwart
At the first Associated Students Student Senate meeting, the senators voted unanimously to recommend the impeachment of Genaro Meza-Roa, AS VP for business and operations, and to release a statement explaining their decision.
The vote came after what was scheduled to be a 30 minute discussion at their Monday night meeting turned into 90 minutes, with AS Board of Directors members and senators airing concerns about Meza-Roa’s conduct.
Meza-Roa was not present at the meeting, despite being informed by an AS Review reporter that his conduct would be discussed during the senate meeting. Levi Eckman, AS VP for academic affairs and the chair of the senate, said he also invited Meza-Roa personally.
In a later interview, Meza-Roa said he wasn’t able to attend the senate meeting because of another obligation.
Calling the vote uninformed, Meza-Roa said he believed the recommendation for impeachment was a personal vendetta against him by several people within the AS, not out of professional concern.
“To see a unanimous decision from a senate is a cause of great suspicion,” he said.
The recommendation will go to a vote at the board’s next meeting, this Friday, Jan. 18. If the board votes to impeach, Meza-Roa will be removed from the position he was elected to unopposed. The senate also passed a motion to ask the AS Elections Committee to investigate Meza-Roa’s job performance, if the board votes not to impeach.
Nicole Ballard, senator at-large, said she believed that, based on testimony they had heard at the meeting from board members, the AS board has enough information to make a decision.
Nick Makrakis, senator for the College of Business and Economics, does not believe any contradictions will come up in an investigation prior to the board’s vote that would change the senate’s recommendation to impeach, he said.
After a discussion on the implications of an investigation, Jona Akelipa, senator for the College of Business and Economics, said if Meza-Roa had any disagreement with a possible ruling of impeachment, he could file a grievance.
Many senators referenced an AS Review article published earlier this week that detailed concerns raised by AS board members about Meza-Roa and several new concerns were brought up in the lengthy discussion.
Dayjha McMillan, Fairhaven senator, said they received an email from a student who said that they had sought a no-contact order concerning Meza-Roa. The student said they’d had a disturbing encounter with Meza-Roa and Western deemed there to be insufficient evidence for a no-contact order. The student moved out of the state as a result, McMillan said.
Meza-Roa said he was unaware of any no-contact order being sought against him and described the incident as a falling out, while declining to comment further on the nature of the interaction. He said that people often described their interactions with him as uncomfortable because he is not afraid of confrontation.
An investigation would only be into the ability of Meza-Roa to fulfill the position he was voted into, not on any allegations of misconduct against him, according to Eckman.
Board members also shared that they believed Meza-Roa had not fulfilled his job responsibilities.
Meza-Roa has been absent from posted office hours and not showing up to meetings, Millka Solomon, AS president, said. He was also absent from AS staff fall and winter training, at which there was a workshop on sexism in the workplace.
Eckman and Juliet Knowles, AS board assistant for academic shared governance, also accounted for his absence from the office.
Meza-Roa said he has been fulfilling his duties. He said he has been working on attempting to expedite the budget process since the beginning of the quarter, and, as of this quarter, looking into the AS reserves to allocate funds for a group of Peruvian exchange students, including his roommate, who have limited resources to obtain food in their quarter at Western, Meza-Roa said.
Meza-Roa’s job description says he is required to attend all AS staff development training and he missed fall and winter training, Paden Koltiska, senator for the College of Fine and Performing arts, said, based off Solomon’s note of his absence.
Meza-Roa said he wasn’t able to attend fall or winter staff training because of scheduling and financial constraints, due to higher flight prices for returning from his home in California. He also pointed out that a number of other board members had missed summer training.
Solomon described Meza-Roa’s absence from the board meeting to drink wine in a neighboring room as disturbing.
“Drinking on the job is usually an offense, you would usually be fired for that,” Phillip Hensyel, senator for the graduate school, said.
While he said that in retrospect he shouldn’t have stopped by the party on his way back from the bathroom, Meza-Roa said he doesn’t regret the decision and was about to leave when another board member found him. He also said drinking on the job is something other board members have done.
Ama Monkah, VP for activities, said she did not feel comfortable working with Meza-Roa.
In September, during a discussion of inclusivity and respecting preferred pronouns, on the first board member retreat to Anacortes, Wash. Meza-Roa said some people were too sensitive concerning pronoun usage, according to Monkah, Eckman and Solomon.
Meza-Roa confirmed this position, but said that he had been ambushed by the other board members on the issue and had wanted more time to consider the issue since it was a foreign issue before he came to Western a year and a half ago.
“Well they can let me know [what their pronouns are], but I think it’s absurd to force everyone to say it when 99 percent of the population goes by what you think they would use,” he said, adding that he thought it was a violation of his freedom of speech.
Solomon also said that she and other board members had been working with Meza-Roa to get him to fulfill his job responsibilities.
“Genaro officially began his job in June and now it’s January, so that’s like seven months to be getting where his job description is,” Solomon said.
Meza-Roa confirmed that he had met with Solomon to work towards achieving more in his role, but denied that he had ever not met the basic requirements of his job.
Meza-Roa was the only board member not to sign the board’s statement of solidarity with marginalized communities on campus that they sent out last quarter, Camilla Mejia, VP for diversity, said.
One struggle was confusion about what board members could share about their interactions about Meza-Roa.
When Monkah first began to recount what happened with Meza-Roa on their retreat, she was stopped by Sam Frost, AS communications director, before they decided that it was technically a public meeting since all the board members were present.
The board had also opted to go into executive session, excluding the public, to discuss previous issues with Meza-Roa, meaning there was no public record of complaints brought up for the senate to reference. Board members declined to answer questions about their decision to go in to executive session for a previous article.
“Nothing is really transparent,” Ballard said.
The recommendation of impeachment will now move to the board for this Friday’s agenda. To pass it needs a three-quarters vote of its sitting members, according to Leti Romo, board program advisor.
Updated 1/15/2019 at 1 a.m.: Phillip Hensyel represents students in the graduate school, not Fairhaven.
Updated 1/17/2019 at 12:15 p.m. with responses from Meza-Roa.