Editorial by Kernel staff. E-mail [email protected]

The Student Government Senate wisely pumped the brakes on the proposed driving program at its first meeting of the year.

Senators voted to table the $85,000 late-night driving service until next week, amending it from the final budget for later discussion. The decision came after many senators said they had not heard of the proposal, with several others only recently hearing of the idea.

SG President Ryan Smith said he had reservations about passing the budget without the service, a program “we’ve invested a lot of time in,” he said. But, his reservation should be how uninformed his Senate was of the project and not that the vote was put on hold.

Senators should not blindly make such a major decision that represents 17 percent of the total SG budget without any knowledge.

Yes, offering a driving service would reduce drunken driving and violent crimes. Several of UK’s benchmark institutions with similar programs have noticed a decline in both issues from implementing such programs.

However, senators, and even more importantly, students, need to know about services like this more than a few weeks before they go into action.

How many students knew about the service more than a few days before it was to be voted on? Even now, how many students know what the schedule will be once it is set in place?

In the end, Smith and his administration look bad for pushing a project that so few people knew about.

Going into a second term, SG has to know how important communication is to the process, especially when student safety is the subject.

For a government project, people have to know what’s going on and something like this should not catch anyone in the student body by surprise, much less the people voting on it.