Vote Feb. 23 and 24: Who, What, Why

By Travis Pillow

Most years, student government elections wind up being inconsequential. The establishment party always wins, and nothing meaningful happens. But this year, there are several important ballot initiatives that could transform the way our campus is run in coming years. Literally millions of dollars in student money are at stake, and high turnout could give the new Student Alliance a fighting chance.

The Ballot Initiatives

The wording of these questions is opaque, so make sure you know what you’re voting for going in.

A New Student Body Constitution
Every 10 years, SG’s governing document comes before a committee that cleans up errors and changes other rules governing the rights of students and our elected representatives. Most of the changes are symbolic or semantic, and the wording is practically incomprehensible, but one change stands out: if this passes, ballot initiatives to amend the Student Body Constitution will require the signatures of 5 percent of the student body, instead of the current 10 percent.

Gathering some 5,000 signatures, plus enough to compensate for errors, duplicates and illegibility, is a nearly Herculean task. Just ask Students for Online Voting. Cutting that number in half will strengthen what democracy exists on our campus. Vote YES.

The Reitz Union Two-Parter
See our complete coverage of this issue, and this lucid but dated Gainesville Sun article, for more information.

Part One: Fee increase
SG President Jordan Johnson did the right thing and exempted graduate students from the fee. But what about the rest of us? The SG budget tells us little about how the Reitz Union spends its money, and the estimated $42.5 million in repairs comes from a single engineering firm. If the repairs are so urgent that students need to cough up money immediately, Union staff should have sought more independent evaluations and opened their books to public inspection to allow us to make an informed decision.

The new fees will not be covered by Bright Futures or Florida Prepaid. There are other ways to pay for these repairs, but students are being treated as a source of easy money. Vote NO.

Part Two: Expansion
Should the building be expanded? Perhaps. But before students vote on the matter, shouldn’t we know what the expansion includes and how much it will cost? Complete expansion plans have not been released yet (preliminary sketches aside), so the “entire floor of meeting space” and other goodies touted by the dubious Renew Your Reitz campaign are mostly speculative, and depend on funding constraints and other factors.

Again, students have not been given enough information to make an informed decision. Again, vote NO.

Sweatshop Referendum
This non-binding question will simply take the pulse of the student body to determine whether we support using UF’s enormous power in the athletic-apparel market to help shut down sweatshops that serve companies like Nike. The initiative has support from all quarters of the student body, and the administration is currently looking into whether joining the Worker Rights Consortium is in their best interests. Help make their decision easier. Vote YES.

Candidates

President and Vice President are a package deal. Someone should inform the Alligator.

The Unite Party’s Ashton Charles boasts a sterling resume with impressive titles that currently include President of the Student Senate. What she has actually accomplished in those plum positions is another question. Her recent actions include supporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in new “administrative fees” paid to the UF administration out of student coffers, and a bill supporting the proposed Reitz fee without the approval of the student body. She has said she intends to “drive a hard bargain on behalf of the students,” but her record suggests otherwise.

The Student Alliance’s Ben Cavataro, by contrast, began his SG career in the Fall of 2007 as the only member member of Student Senate from an opposition party. Ever since, he has been working against long odds on behalf of the student body. Where other members of his party have sometimes lost their nerve, at times resorting to acrimonious outbursts and extreme rhetoric, Cavataro has kept an even temper and been something of a voice of reason. He is currently head of the student arm of the state Democratic Party, which could strengthen his hand lobbying for students’ interests in Tallahassee.

Vice President has fewer constitutionally-mandated duties than Student Body President. That means the office is usually charged with special projects – and with managing to fifty-something members of SG’s cabinet. Unite candidate Marcus Dixon has alread served as cabinet director, and collected awards including Cabinet Member of the Year. The Student Alliance’s Sagar Sane, on the other hand, has a record of innovation that includes soliciting private donations to create a multi-million-dollar endowment to help fund the campus speaker’s bureau at the UNC Chapel Hill – something he hopes to repeat here, which will allow Accent to bring in better speakers at a lower cost. Compared to Sane, Dixon seems short on new ideas. Vote Student Alliance – Cavataro and Sane.

Treasurer

Unite’s Virlany Taboada landed a zinger during a debate sponsored by the Freshmen Leadership Council. When her opponents promised, if elected, to donate their salaries to the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Fund, she countered that she’s a beneficiary of the fund, which helps working-class students from the first generation in their family to attend college. She went on to argue that having grown up on a limited budget (something that’s rare for SG candidates in either party, who overwhelmingly come from privileged backgrounds) has prepared her for managing the students’ finances responsibly.

Before running for treasurer, the Student Alliance’s Rafael Yaniz may have been best known for backing a controversial Senate resolution as a leader of Gators for Israel. In recent months, though, he has emerged as a forceful critic of the Blackberries, Park Anywhere decals, unrestricted free printing and other perks SG officials lavish on themselves, and vowed to end the practice. He also plans to reduce waste and fight money-grabs by the administration, leaving more student money for things we want, like free printing all over campus. He also intends to help scrutinize the Reitz Union’s finances and make SG budgets more transparent, so we can see where our money goes.

If national politics and foreign affairs drove our decisions in SG elections, we’d have to go with Taboada. But in this year of tightening budgets, with the potentially millions of new, unaccountable dollars extracted from students as fees, we need a treasurer willing to fight the administration and dismantle SG’s sense of entitlement. Vote YANIZ.