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Sustainable future vote on horizon
By Brandon Daviet
bdaviet@mscd.edu

The Auraria Board decided March 14 to allow students to vote on renewing and raising student fees to continue the sustainable-campus program.

The student vote will take place on April 26 and 27, and if approved the proposal will move on to the individual governing boards of the campus’s three schools for approval.

“I believe that the board believes that students should vote for themselves as part of the democratic process. Whether or not the institutional boards will support it or not is another matter,” said Shaun Lally, chair of the Student Advisory Committee to the Auraria Board.

Dean Wolf, executive vice president for administration for the Auraria Higher Education Center, pointed out that final approval of the measure would depend largely on student interest.

“I can’t stress how important a high voter turnout will be to the overall success of this proposal,” Wolf said.

The proposal was made to the board complete with a video presentation detailing some of the proposed changes. Plans for new recycling bins around campus were among the changes discussed. Due to the high level of student interest the meeting was held in the Tivoli Turnhalle to accommodate the extra attendees.

As part of their retooled proposal, SACAB dropped its request for a full-time staffer to coordinate the program. Instead the program will utilize volunteers and interns to help facilitate it.

“The board felt that creating a staff position would create a mini-bureaucracy, and we wanted to be sensitive to their concerns and comply with what they felt was necessary,” Lally said.

However, part of the proposal the Auraria Board approved makes possible the creation of a staff position to manage the program after one year.

“The decision to add a staff position at a later date will be entirely up to students, because it is student money that would be used,” Lally said.

With this hurdle cleared, Lally plans to use the weeks before the student vote to increase student awareness and help ensure that as many students as possible vote.

“Our get-out-the-vote campaign starts today,” he said. “After hearing the board’s concerns, we know we need to get a high voter turnout. It will be a lot of work for us, but we believe we can get there.”

Board member Maria Garcia Berry, who was one of the original proposal’s most vocal critics, expressed her appreciation for SACAB’s willingness to compromise and present a new proposal on such short notice.

“I thought it was a very well-done proposal,” she said. “If anything I wish it were a little less aggressive, but I will vote for it.”

The sustainable-campus program was started in 2004. Since its implementation students have been paying a $1 clean-energy fee each semester. As a result, 45 percent of the campus’s energy comes from renewable sources.

The new plan would increase student fees over the next five years and allow the campus to become still more environmentally friendly and energy-efficient. Under the current proposal the plan would be managed by SACAB.