The Government of the Student Body waived a bill for second read at Wednesday night’s meeting, awarding Campustown Rail Jam $1,800 for its Welch Avenue freestyle skiing and snowboarding exhibition.

According to the GSB Web site, a new piece of legislation is submitted to the legislative management system, where it goes through the rules committee and the finance committee if it’s a finance bill.

From there the bill is given to the speaker of the senate to be read at the next meeting.

All bills require two reads, with the exception of seating bills and confirmations of executive nominations. The second read is when the bill is voted on, tabled or ruled out of order. The president holds the power to veto bills.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the Rail Jam bill had the second read waived and was passed.

GSB senator and junior in political science Brian Phillips was one of the authors of the bill.

He said he authored the bill because it’s a good community event that GSB has supported before.

“It’s something that we funded in the past,” he said.

GSB senator and graduate student in biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology Adam Krupicka, also an author of the bill, said he did so because he liked the event.

“It seemed like a great event,” he said.

The bill’s second read was waived since the event will be held on February 24, Phillips said. Holding off on the bill was not an option because of the short time frame.

The urgency for the approval is because the group was not sure if it could hold the event until Tuesday night.

“The group got approval from city council to hold the event on Tuesday,” he said.

Another reason why there was such short notice for the bill was because the group was trying to get the best possible insurance quote from risk management before coming to GSB.

Contacting the senators was the main reason that there was so little debate on the bill before it was passed, Phillips said.

“[It was passed easily] mostly because we worked hard to let everyone know what was going on,” he said.

The authors had also contacted GSB finance director and graduate student in civil, construction and environmental engineering Jason Carroll before the meeting to make sure that everything with the bill was OK.

Phillips said that the number of bills that have their second read waived varies from year to year. He said that only in extreme cases do bills get fast-tracked and that if he could have, he would have put this for second read.

Krupicka said that if it would have been possible, he would have rather had a second read and that there are few situations where it is appropriate to waive second read.

“It’s not often that that occurs,” he said.