Committee clears McClendon

Shaniqua McClendon did not lie to Student Congress when she presented a Concepts of Colors funding request the ethics committee ruled Sunday.

Congress also raised questions about how its finance committee scrutinizes requests and said better evaluation would have prevented the confusion.

McClendon treasurer of the modeling troupe was called into question after Congress members heard that she told her business class she had taken advantage of the system.

Last week Congress decided to launch an ethics investigation to clarify McClendon's story.

The ethics committee decided that Concepts should resubmit its request next week to the finance committee. The original request was for $7535 which would come from student fees.

The main question was whether the group's budget asked for more than was needed" which the committee deemed was an issue for the finance committee.

But the ethics committee established that McClendon had been honest with Congress and had presented an exaggerated story in her class.

""Clearly" if I had done this if I had been trying to get away with something I wouldn't have admitted it to a room of 30 or 40 people McClendon said in the meeting.

Members of the ethics committee also thought a problem was that the finance committee did not thoroughly evaluate the request when it came to them.

It's not the responsibility of the groups to find the lowest price" said representative Elizabeth Humphrey. I think the onus falls on the finance committee to better evaluate the request.""

The recommendations the committee established included informing groups of what Congress examines in requests" increasing the transparency of the budget system and asking for more specific requests from groups.

Meetings of the ethics committee traditionally are held to deal with Congress' internal issues.

The Student Code states that the committee has the authority to investigate violations of the Honor Code by members of Congress" violations of Congress' ethics laws and violations of the N.C. Open Meetings Laws.

But Congress has the authority to refer any bill through any committee — what it did in this instance.

Speaker Tim Nichols said they wanted to send the bill through the ethics committee to clear up the validity of the request before sending it back to the finance committee.

""This was an external situation we needed cleaned up"" he said. We thought the ethics committee would be the most appropriate to have these discrepancies cleared up.""

Concepts of Colors will resubmit its request to the finance committee at the next committee meeting Tuesday.

Congress members did say they would scrutinize closely Concepts' next funding request.



Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.