For Student Association comptroller candidate Phil Kramer, there is a more valuable way to approach this semester’s spring elections than self-promotion.

Kramer, who is running uncontested for comptroller in April’s school-wide presidential elections, said he is spending time mostly preparing for the role and trying to gauge what issues he will face and the best way to help alleviate those issues.

“It’s my job right now to learn this role as best as I can,” he said.

Kramer, a sophomore economics and finance major, said that as far as the elections go, he isn’t too concerned with campaigning. Kramer said that while he wants to interact with students and get them to know his face, his No. 1 priority is learning how SA is going to confront the issues that the organization faces. He added that he hopes to increase communication between different facets of SA.

Kramer currently serves as assistant comptroller in SA and has been on the finance board since October of his freshman year. He said in that time, he has been able to see every kind of budget there is in SA and was able to observe the types of issues that the comptroller and other groups run into.

Kramer said one of his goals for the comptroller position is to address the disconnect between the finance board, the cabinet and SA. He said that too often in SA meetings, all that happens in the finance board presentations is scrolling through a word document. Kramer said that to even talk for two or three minutes at meetings about what went into the decisions of the financial board so the assembly really understands could be beneficial.

Another one of Kramer’s goals is increasing the roles of the student organizations SA funds, he said. If an event wasn’t very successful for a student organization in the past and it wants funding for a new event, Kramer suggests bringing the conversation to the assembly floor and figuring out how the group is going to get a better turnout and more efficient use of its money for the new event.

“Let’s put you up in front of assembly so you can talk about how you are going to improve it this time,” he said.

Kramer said he likes talking to people and thinks students would like to come to him with their problems as far as funding goes.

“I think I can really hold up the office well and just have a really good, forward-looking attitude and see how we can solve problems rather than just go through the motions,” he said.

Published on March 2, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact William: wrnorris@syr.edu