The Talley Student Center board of directors voted Monday to remove the Off Campus Residents’ Association representative from its board.

“OCRA doesn’t exist anymore,” Sara Yasin, a junior in textile and apparel management and president of the Talley board of directors, said. She said the board voted to replace the vacant seat with a representative from the Center for Student Leadership, Ethics and Public Service.

OCRA, during its existence, aimed to address issues of off-campus students.

Seneca Toms a senior in horticulture science, was one of the members of OCRA before its dissolution. “It basically was an organization that tried to find out what the needs of off-campus students are,” he said.

According to Toms, OCRA made many efforts over its lifetime to reach out to off-campus students. They hosted the off-campus housing fair for two years and provided programming on campus for residents thinking about moving off-campus.

“We did a program about the dos and don’ts of living off campus,” Toms said. Some issues covered were “making sure your landlord doesn’t take advantage of you” and “how to make sure that you’re choosing a good roommate.”

Toms also said OCRA held “community forums around the Raleigh area and basically surveyed students.”

The campus activities office also conducted online surveys of off-campus residents in conjunction with OCRA’s polls.

According to Deb Luckadoo, the activities director at Talley, the surveys showed overall that off-campus students were not interested in social programming and events.

“They just really didn’t indicate any interest in getting together,” she said. Off-campus students were, according to the survey, most interested in transportation-related issues like the Wolfline and parking.

Toms said OCRA spent a lot of time on advocacy for transportation issues. “We gave a lot of feedback to transportation about what some of the needs of [commuter students] are,” he said. “Parking availability … things of that nature.”

However, according to Luckadoo, OCRA was not highly effective at altering transportation issues because transportation is limited by their budget.

“I do feel like our transportation department does everything they can within the resources they have,” Luckadoo said.

Luckadoo said the members of OCRA eventually lost interest because, “In the end, there was just … not a big need there that was begging to be filled except in an area where they just didn’t feel like they had a lot of potential to make an impact.”

She said the dissolution of OCRA was not due to a lack of effort.

“I really did feel that students who were committed to the whole idea did everything they should have done,” she said. “[There just] wasn’t a lot they could do in terms of the issues students expressed concern in.”