Two special committees made presentations to the Government of the Student Body at the regular meeting Wednesday.

Both the Pedestrian Safety study group and the Election Code Examination and Revision Committee presented recommendations based on their respective findings for consideration by GSB.

“While this campus is pretty pedestrian-friendly, we are working on ways to make it even better,” said Hillary Isebrands, research engineer and graduate student at Iowa State.

Education, improvements and enforcement were the three areas of primary focus for the group, according to the presentation.

“We need to have consistent signs and markings throughout campus,” said Cathy Brown, ISU campus planner.

According to ISU Police Capt. Doug Houghton, an average of four or five accidents occur annually on the ISU campus.

“But since September of 2000, there have been 42 injuries to pedestrians and cyclists at Iowa State,” Houghton said.

One of the changes already implemented on campus is a new yield sign for the crosswalk by the Gerdin Business Building.

“The first sign we put up was vandalized after six days,” Houghton said. “But the new one has been left alone so far.”

Jonathan Richardson and Brian Phillips, both GSB senators, presented the findings of the Election Code Examination and Revision Committee.

The committee found that the election code should be changed to a standing code in order to reduce the extraneous changes made to it annually.

“Since it can be tinkered with every year, pretty soon no one understands anything in the code,” Richardson said.

Another recommendation the committte made was to increase the monetary penalties for infractions of the election code.

“We would like to see the fines raised as more of an incentive to follow election rules,” Phillips said.

The committee hopes that violations would be reduced by creating a well-defined set of rules to govern GSB elections.

“If candidates could understand exactly what the rules are, they wouldn’t be as likely to break them,” Phillips said.

Both the Jensen/Faber and the Alliger/Nelson campaigns were fined after the recent GSB election because of separate rule infractions.