The Student Fee Choice initiative aims to make the $1,600 annual Associated Students fee optional. The student fees fund all Associated Students entities, including student-led groups within the association, and Senate and staff salaries. Due to legal code, the initiative will not have a tangible impact on student fees.
The Student Fee Choice initiative aims to make the $1,600 annual Associated Students fee optional. Nexus file photo
Sam Safahi, a third-year economics and accounting major, created the initiative in fall quarter. In an interview with the Nexus, Safahi said he feels they are “a big line of expense” for students’ expenditures. He believes students often do not make use of the expenses funded by these fees and that Associated Students (A.S.) is ineffective in its use of student fees.
“They just don’t care. They don’t try. They don’t want to,” Safahi said. “It’s really easy to take money from students and then give it to the University and say you’re a senator or to pass a bill taking money from students and giving it to some commission that gives it to some staff, but it’s harder to actually do something meaningful to help students.”
On Oct. 31, 2025, A.S. Elections Board Chair and fourth-year political science major Caleb Hanson sent an email to Safahi telling him to stop collecting signatures for his petition. Hanson’s reasoning was that Safahi was “acting outside the legal period for signature collection.”
In response, Safahi alleged Hanson was in violation of A.S. legal code, specifically obstruction of a constitutional right, which protects the ability for students to gather signatures for constitutional amendments year-round. The Judicial Council (JC) received the petition for the case on Nov. 4, 2025.
To get a Constitutional Amendment added to a student election ballot, the petition must receive signatures amounting to at least 50% of the total number of voters who voted for an A.S. President in the last Spring Quarter General Election. If that amount is achieved, the Senate would submit the amendment to be voted on during the next general or special election ballot.
The JC found that Hanson was acting outside his authority as Constitutional Amendments become an election procedure “after the petition has been submitted to the Senate and its signature verified.” Therefore, Hanson could not order Safahi to stop collecting signatures for his initiative.
In order for petition signatures to be valid, they must be collected in a way that “complies with all relevant UCSB and UC policies, along with state and federal law.” This includes The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act training to collect the signatures.
Additionally, all signatures must be verifiable through the collection of student names and perm numbers. The signatures must be checked for duplicates, so it’s preferred if students use a secure online system that has them log in using their NetID to sign the petition. Any student can be provided a “suitable” system for collecting signatures from A.S. staff, the same system used for the campus elections.
According to JC Chair and fourth-year political science, philosophy and Germanic and Slavic studies triple major Josie Penix, Google Forms cannot be used to collect signatures. This is because the results of a Google Form can be transferred to a Google Sheet, which can then be edited by the owner of the document, therefore making the signatures unverifiable.
Safahi has been collecting signatures for his petition using a Google Form. Therefore, the signatures he has collected thus far are unverifiable and invalid.
Also, according to Penix, neither students nor A.S. are in direct control of student fees, other than fee reaffirmations that get voted on during general elections. Students cannot make student fees optional through a Constitutional Amendment. If the amendment is passed, it would simply change legal code, not the actual student fees.
According to the 1993 Superior Court of Alameda County case Smith v. Regents of University of California, a student who has a conflicting political opinion to a student organization that receives funding from student fees may be eligible to receive a refund from the University.
A version of this article appeared on p. 6 of the Jan. 15 print edition of the Daily Nexus.
