Club affected by second executive order

Constantino said the A&SF Office had a problem purchasing the Apple iOS developer software because UCF already owns a license and that there were “property control concerns” regarding the iPod Touch and the Kindle Fire.

He said he did speak to representatives from the club, but he only told them that he had to check to make sure purchasing the items was allowed.

“When I spoke to the representatives from the club, my response was that I would check with Purchasing and University Audit to be sure that everything was OK,” Constantino, who is currently out of town, said in an email. “I never spoke with anyone from Purchasing, nor did I say I was going to speak to someone. I did, however, review all Purchasing policies and guidelines myself and spoke to someone in University Audit.”

When asked, Szerlip said he believes some of the students who were in SGA had a personal dislike for Forward stemming from a Senate meeting a few years back.

“It just seems like two people [McCann and former SGA comptroller and A&SF committee chair Joshua Miller] really didn’t like us and they used whatever means they could to stop us from being active in Senate,” Szerlip said.

Forward said that his personal interactions with McCann were limited, but there was an instance where he and Miller had a disagreement. In 2008, Miller was Forward’s senator when he was with Habitat for Humanity. When a bill for Habitat for Humanity to build houses in Alabama was discussed in Senate, Miller was asked to speak in favor of the bill but he didn’t.

Forward said he sent a follow-up email to Miller asking why he didn’t speak in favor of the bill, but the email was never returned. A week later when the organization went to spend the bill, it was told that Miller had dropped them as a senator.

McCann said his actions were based on what he thought would benefit the student body, not on any kind of emotion.

“What their role is and what they were trying to accomplish wasn’t in line with ASF funding,” McCann said.

He said that anything funded by the A&SF had to be accessible to all students, but the cloud storage would not be. He also said that Senate had never before funded items like iPod Touches and Kindle Fires.

“I felt as though the funding practices within the FAO committee favored that organization over other organizations, which led to unprecedented funding,” McCann said. “I think all organizations should be funded based on merits, not relationships.”

McCann said he believed the FAO committee funded these items because Forward and FAO chair Kevin Gay were roommates. Gay confirmed that he and Forward were roommates for about two years until recently.

Szerlip described what happened to the Mobile Innovation Club as “bullying,” and he hopes in the future that SGA has more oversight.

“We’re not looking to shut down Senate; we just think that people shouldn’t be allowed to behave this way and that when they are behaving this way provably so, there should be a designated person to go to at UCF in which we voice our complaints for this, where it’s not like sort of a sham runaround,” Szerlip said, adding that he believed McCann chose the last day of his presidency to issue the executive order so he wouldn’t experience any consequences.

Both Forward and Szerlip said that they felt as if their right to participate in student government granted to them in the Golden Rule had been violated.

As for the claims in the executive order, Szerlip believes McCann was incorrect in his perception of what the Mobile Innovation Club is. Szerlip believes that because Forward works in Research Park, McCann thought that the club had those same connections.

“Nobody in the club actually thinks that we’re associated with Allogy [where Forward works] or that we’re an extension of Allogy,” Szerlip said. “If you asked any of our members, they’d be extremely confused by some claim that we’re an existing department of the school.”

Szerlip also said that McCann issued the executive order as a preemptive measure, specifically when he mentioned the club’s “commercial interests” in the executive order.

“They sort of projected what they thought we were about, but they never bothered to check with me or the people who run the club about what it is we are actually about,” Szerlip said.