By Caitlein Ryan
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 14, 1997

Fee is the best way to fund Union

Editor:

It is a wonderful thing that people are getting interested in the Student Union Referendum. I think that this is a great case against the argument that young people are apathetic to the issues around them. The difficulty we are facing is where do the students get the information they need to make the decision they feel comfortable with. There are plenty of places to go, but it is next to impossible to get information that is not biased. Unfortunately, I can only give you one side as well, but I will try to incorporate as much of the other side as possible.

I have been on the Referendum Advisory Group since the first week of school. There are those that have been in the group longer than that, and trust me when I say that we have been over this issue more times than I would like to remember. Mainly though, I would like to address the new group begun by Jeff Schrade, "Union yes/ fee no!" From what I understand, the group advocates the use of the $25 million of academic bonds for the project. Already I know a lot of people are wondering about academic backed bonds, an allotted amount of money that the Board of Regents has approved the university to go in debt. It is true that the board has already approved the money. If we use that money with a $20 student fee, the numbers work out to roughly $49 per student per semester. Already this is not a viable option.

The other option is to use only the $25 million and have no fee, "Union yes, fee no!," right? Well, that was an option the RAG thought of at the beginning of the year as we were trying to hammer out the best possible solution. As we learned about the entire budget of the University, I began to understand how little control I had over my tuition dollars once it left my hand. Don't get me wrong, students do have a say in how the money is spent on the regents level, but the bottom line is that when Dick Roberts sits down to decide the budget, he doesn't form a student committee to help him out. So, we decide to find the best possible way to pay for the Union with the maximum amount of control for the students. If we decided to go with the academic bonding alone, there is the possibility that tuition would go up if later on down the road we run into problems with construction. If tuition goes up, that is not just a tuition hike that affects us, but ASU and NAU as well, because in Arizona we don't have differential tuition. This is yet another factor that diminishes the students control of the financing of the new Student Union. We will be paying for the Union no matter what, the question is then how much control do we want to have over every part of this facility that is for us.

One last point that I would like everyone to take into account is that the Student Union is not just a building, but a symbol of the campus community. I am president of the University Activities Board, the programming board of the university. I just got back from a conference of all programming boards in the far west region, and our budget is ridiculously tiny in comparison to the rest of the nation. There was a community college that had a campus population a third the size of ours, and we have a budget a fourth the size of this community college. I am explaining this because I want everyone to realize that there are other colleges that have the money to bring activities to their campus that our university cannot. For example, one university brought Counting Crows, and Dr. Drew and Adam Corolla of Love Line for free to the students. We don't have the ability to bring even one of those acts. There is a provision in the referendum that allows some of that money to go to student programs i.e. big name talent for free.

With the referendum, students benefit from total control of the financing of the union as well as better programming that will help build campus unity. What they could lose is that control of the money and we could be stuck with the same old events on campus. Not to mention having to address the issue of how to finance the rest of the project later on down the line. With the referendum as it is written now, the fee could go down in time if the university gets more money than expected, there will be no "administrative surprises," and if we the students don't feel that this partnership is working out with the administration we can back out of the deal. We have covered all of the bases. And the support is there from all sides. faculty and administrators have volunteered money all the way up to donations of $1,000. The community has also voiced their support. This partnership can and will work if we just stand up with our stipulations and commit to a well protected agreement to build a new Student Union with a "yes" vote.

Caitlein Ryan
President, University Activities Board
Member, Referendum Advisory Group