Members of the Constitutional Council,

Summary of Request:

	We request that the Constitutional Council order Stanford Student Enterprises to release its financial statements for each year since its founding, as well as the salaries of its student employees.


Historical Background:

	On April 24th, the Stanford Review and Stanford Daily sent a joint letter to Ross Davisson, the CEO of Stanford Student Enterprises, requesting "access to the salaries of all SSE employees, a copy of SSE's financial statements from the past three years, and a listing of SSE's current investments."  On May 8th, Henry Towsner, Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Review, met with Mr. Davisson, and agreed to restrict the request to balance sheets for SSE as a whole and the salaries of student employees of SSE, along with the listing of current investments.  The agreement was based on Mr. Davisson's concerns that releasing financial data could undermine SSE's negotiating position with the University.
	On May 23rd, Mr. Davission rejected the request (other than the breakdown of investments) without stating a reason.


Constitutional Argument

	Article 1, Section 7, Subsection 1, of the ASSU Constitution reads, "All records of any Association entity must be available for scrutiny by the public with the exception of proprietary business information of Association businesses...and personnel records of employees.  Every other Association organ must allow access to records.  The access must be open to all and subject only to administrative requirements to safeguard the information and to provide access in a timely, efficient manner."  Stanford Student Enterprises is an entity of the Association, authorized by Article VII of the Joint By-Laws of the Association.
	We argue that SSE's response was unconstitutional on two grounds.  Firstly, the documents requested are records of the Association, and therefore must be made available upon request.  Because SSE has not offered any justification for his rejection of our request, it has implicitly accepted our argument that the documents requested are indeed public records.
	Secondly, regardless of the content of SSE's response, it has clearly failed the Constitutional requirement that our request be processed in a "timely, efficient manner."  Davisson received our request on the afternoon of April 24th, and offered no response for almost two weeks.  After he met with Mr. Towsner, it was another two weeks before SSE finally responded with any of the information requested.  In total, in took almost precisely one month to receive any of the information requested, enough time that filing the case had to be put off until the following year.  SSE has clearly failed in its obligation to provide reasonable access to its public information.
	We have expanded the request to include the full financial statements based on the fact that multiple University administrators, including the Assistant to the President, already have access to this information through their positions on SSE's Board of Directors.


Proposed Remedy:

	 We ask that the Constitutional Council find the failure of Stanford Student Enterprises to release public documents unconstitutional, to nullify its rejection of our request, and to instruct it to release its balance sheet, statement of cash flows, and income statement for each year since it was founded, as well as the salaries paid for each of its positions staffed by students or recent students.





Letter sent to Ross Davisson:
Ross Davisson
CEO, Stanford Student Enterprises


Dear Ross Davisson;

        The Stanford Daily and Stanford Review are both interested in doing stories on SSE's finances.  For these stories, we would like to gain access to the salaries of all SSE employees, a copy of SSE's financial statements from the past three years, and a listing of SSE's current investments.  We believe that this information is public under Article 1, Section 7 of the ASSU Constitution ("All records of any Association entity must be available for scrutiny by the public with the exception of proprietary business information of Association businesses...and personnel records of employees.").
        The two potentially relevant exceptions do not apply in this case; proprietary business information is information in which SSE has a property interest, that is, information whose release would injure SSE's competitive stature.  None of the information we are requesting would do so.  Similarly, personnel records applies to information specific to a particular person, not, for instance, the general salary for a position.
        Thank you for your time.

Henry Towsner
Editor-in-Chief, Stanford Review
Editor@stanfordreview.org
7-4531


Mark Boucher
Editor-in-Chief, The Stanford Daily
Eic@daily.stanford.edu
725-2100 x501





Henry,

I have reached a decision. I am not going to be able to release the balance
sheet, statement of cash flows, or income statement for SSE at this time.

In reference to your question about salaries, I will tell you that our
employees earn between $500 and $1500 in salary per quarter.  Some of them
are entitled to performance-based bonuses on top of that.

You had also asked about our asset allocation in our investments.  There are
two major investment accounts that we have.  One has the ASSU Endowment,
which is used to fund the ASSU Political budget, and the other is the
operating fund that we use to run banking for student groups and operate on
a day-to-day basis.

The asset allocation targets for both are currently being re-evaluated, but
at the most recent review, the operating fund allocation was set to
60%/15%/25% equities/bonds/cash and the endowment allocation was set to
70%/20%/10% equities/bonds/cash.  Within each asset class, we diversify by
investing in different vehicles such as mutual funds.

Ross