Word: referendums
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...Undergraduate Council wants a raise. When they return from spring break, students will face a referendum that will ask them to double their council term bill fee from $20 to $40. While this request is sure to be controversial, we encourage students to vote in favor of the hike...
...initiatives around the country. Most of them passed. Some stripped local authorities of the power to approve new subdivisions without voter assent. Others okayed tax money to buy open land before the developers get it. In the largest of those, New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman successfully pushed a referendum to use sales-tax money to buy half the state's undeveloped land--a million acres. "Americans are finally realizing that once you lose land, you can't get it back," she says...
...month from now, students will be asked in a referendum to double their term bill student activities fee from $20 to $40 thereby doubling the budget of the Undergraduate Council. Three years ago, as a council member myself, I spent several weeks drafting and presenting a proposal calling for a referendum to double the term bill fee. But in retrospect, I am glad my idea went nowhere; then as now, the council simply did not deserve the raise...
...first-year representative, Francesca Petrosino, grew so infuriated last month when the council rejected a binding referendum on how to spend the council's recovered $40,000 that she decided to resign. In her resignation letter, Petrosino recalled her disgust at the debate about that referendum: "I watched elected representatives fool themselves that they somehow were more entitled to make a decision allocating the 40k than the students they claimed to care so much about. We are nothing without them, yet we think and behave as though they don't matter once they give us their vote...
...short run, this may mean voting against the term bill hike in the April referendum, unless the council is prepared to reconsider (and approve) downsizing between now and then. Short of a "constitutional convention" to draft an all-new student government--not a bad idea in itself--this kind of pressure may be the only route students have to making the council accountable and legitimate. And once legitimacy is attained, even just a little legitimacy, a lot more will be possible than doling out dollars to student groups. Geoffrey C. Upton '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House...