The Georgetown University Student Association (GUSA) Senate approved unanimously a resolution urging Georgetown University to lower the cost of on-campus laundry services and confirmed a streamlining of GUSA bylaws at its Jan. 22 meeting.

GUSA President Camber Vincent (SFS ’24) spearheaded the efforts to modify GUSA’s bylaws, while first-year senators Meriam Ahmad (CAS ’26) and Rhea Iyer (CAS ’26) sponsored a resolution to reduce the price of laundry by 50 cents to $1.25 per load. Fellow first-year senators George Currie (CAS ’26), Dylan Davis (CAS ’26), Seth Edwards (CAS ’26), Hilary Orozco (CAS ’26) and Andrew Wong (SFS ’26) served as co-sponsors of the resolution.

One washer or dryer cycle cost $1.75 in the fall, and the university provided all students $42 for laundry and printing expenses. 

Ahmad said that next steps after the resolution’s passage would include meeting with Residential Living staff to discuss the resolution’s implementation, as GUSA does not have the power to reduce laundry prices on its own.

“Essentially, we are just requesting that Residential Living lower the cost of laundry and that there are always enough funds to, per semester, for students to do laundry once a week,” Ahmad said at Sunday’s senate meeting.

Changing the cost of a laundry cycle to $1.25 would allow students nine more washer or dryer cycles each semester. 

The university replaced several laundry machines in residence halls at the start of the Spring 2023 semester, including Pedro Arrupe, S.J. Hall, Southwest Quadrangle, New South Hall and Copley Hall. The university announced in a Jan. 11 email that laundry would be free through Jan. 20 while its facilities team updated the payment system, after which prices would return to $1.75.

The resolution pointed out this brief period of free laundry as evidence that the $1.75 price is unnecessarily high and noted that several other Washington, D.C. universities, including Howard University, provide students with enough laundry money to allow them to wash and dry one load of laundry weekly.

“Lowering the cost of laundry to $1.25 per load would allow students to do one load of the washer and one load of the dryer every week for sixteen weeks without having to add more money than the already-allocated $42 for laundry services,” the resolution reads. “Laundry is a basic necessity on a college campus, students should be able to do their laundry without having to worry about adding more money to their accounts.” 

GUSA Finance and Appropriations Committee Chair John DiPierri (SFS ’25) said that a reduction in laundry prices would display GUSA’s commitment to helping students.

“It shows that we are doing things that matter tangibly to students, and I think that is exactly what GUSA was designed for,” DiPierri said at the meeting.

The senate also approved Vincent’s proposed changes to GUSA’s bylaws, which saw several outdated offices and 21 departments officially removed from the bylaws.

Vincent said these changes would remove overlap between the duties of the senate and the GUSA Executive. 

“We got rid of a lot of the duplicity,” Vincent said at the senate meeting. “The main problems due to the senate and the exec, we eliminated. We also streamlined departments so that there is just not 26 departments. That makes a lot more sense in our eyes.”

The changes to the senate include reducing the number of GUSA Senate departments from 26 to five, slight modifications to procedural rules and removing the Finance and Appropriations Committee’s control over GUSA’s budget.

The proposed changes to GUSA’s executive branch include placing several auxiliary operations offices, such as a director of communications and chief operations officer, under the executive branch’s control. It also includes removing from the bylaws the Student Empowerment Fund, a budget intended to bankroll large campus projects and events that the university ceased to fund in 2020.

Vincent said these updates were necessary to ensure GUSA’s bylaws reflected its current operations.

“The by-laws simply no longer matched what we did in practice in regards to several aspects of procedure, and we wanted to ensure continuity between our by-laws and our actual practice,” Vincent wrote in an email to The Hoya.

A final change to the bylaws was a simplification of the GUSA oaths of office, which the senate approved in a 10-9 vote, with several members abstaining. The senate also approved the appointment of Ainsley Dean (SFS ’24) as the chair of the GUSA elections commission in a voice vote.

Vincent said the changes would allow GUSA to better serve students in the future.

“The hope is that we have created a structure that moving forward will result in more impact on student life through our work in GUSA,” Vincent wrote.