This story is part two of a three-part series explaining the issues Student Senate coalitions plan to run on for the 2009 Student Senate elections, which take place April 15 and 16.

Students of Liberty

Students of Liberty, which ran last year with only seven senators and $75, is back on the campaign trail. It has chosen Adam Wood, Lawrence senior, and Johnathan Wilson, Paola junior, as its presidential and vice-presidential nominees.

The coalition said it wanted to run on a simple, threefold platform that included student fees, green energy and Senate accountability.

“We’re focusing our campaign this year on the idea of common sense,” Wood said. “We think what needs to happen at KU is very straightforward. Stop raising my fees, be honest, be sustainable.”

No New Fees

Wood said Students of Liberty wanted to reverse the trend of rising student fees. He said Student Senate needed to be critical of how it was spending its money, especially during this time of economic decline.

“If a student comes here for four years, and let’s say fees don’t go up, they’re paying over $3,000 in fees,” Wood said. “That’s about a semester’s worth of tuition. I think that’s kind of unfair. At the very least we can do better.”

He said he wanted to emphasize that Students of Liberty had absolutely no intention of cutting the campus media fee, which funded KJHK, The University Daily Kansan, Kiosk Magazine, KU Filmworks and KUpedia.

“You have to have a kind of cost-benefit analysis,” Wood said. “If you’ve got a fee and it’s going to hurt students if you cut it, you might want to look somewhere else.”

He said among the fees he thought should be reconsidered were the campus safety fee and the women’s and nonrevenue sports fee. Wood said cutting the Campus Safety Fee would not hurt students because enough funds had built up in the reserve account to continue funding safety projects for several years. He said the Women’s and Non Revenue Sports Fee was something he thought should be funded by the Athletics Corporation, not by students.

He said a thorough auditing of student fees by the Senate was something that needed to happen.

“That’s not even a campaign issue,” Wood said. “It just needs to be done.”

Green Energy

Wood said Students of Liberty was focused on improving campus sustainability. He said he thought the best way to achieve that goal was through making capital improvements to the campus as opposed to doing things such as purchasing wind credits that would not directly benefit the campus.

“It all depends on how long term you want to look,” Wood said. “If you want to look really long term you could look at wind turbines. Short term you want to talk about solar panels.”

Wood said he wanted the funds for the projects to come entirely from the campus environmental improvement fee, which costs students $10 per year. He said Students of Liberty would not raise the fee by any amount.

Wood said his biggest concern was a bill recently passed by Student Senate that said a fee could be used for educational purposes.

“We’ve got five different environmental education groups on campus,” Wood said. “We live in Lawrence, Kansas. People should know what green energy is and if they don’t I’ll explain it to them.”

He said he would like to see the environmental improvement fee banned from using funds for educational purposes and refocus it on campus improvements.

“If anybody’s able to develop these things, KU can,” Wood said. “Maybe instead of redoing the sidewalks in front of Watson, maybe we should be installing solar panels.”

Accountability and Transparency

Wood said Students of Liberty was interested in redefining different roles within Student Senate by creating a more distinct separation of powers.

“Does it make any sense that if the president suspends somebody that the people he appointed to the Student Executive Committee should decide whether to uphold it or not? Of course not,” Wood said. “That’s being the judge, jury and the executioner.”

Wood said there was a hole in Student Senate Rules and Regulations concerning a judicial branch.

“There’s a statute that says complaints go to the judicial committee and it says refer to this statute,” Wood said, “but that statute doesn’t exist.”

He said he was already taking part in an exploratory subcommittee to determine possible ways to address the oversight. He said he would like to see a judicial board that functioned like the parking appeals court as an unbiased third party. He said he would like to see law students working for the board who could not be affiliated with any Senate coalition during the past year.

Wood also said he wanted to increase transparency within Senate by using clickers during meetings to track senators’ votes and posting voting records in an online database. He said a database would enable the student body to be more informed, helping them choose between candidates during elections.

“What that will do is possibly bring more than 15 or 20 percent of the student body out to vote because they’ll actually know what they’re voting for,” Wood said. “If you had a voting database you could say for instance United Students votes more this way and Envision votes more this way or this independent guy votes this way.”

Check The Kansan tomorrow for information about Envision.

— — Edited by Chris Horn