Elections Wrap

Burning Sensation

It was a whirlwind: all heat and flash and then... pain upon urination. New kid on the block Hammerin' Chris Aster gives his perspective on the OSPIRG elections fiasco.

Throughout mankind's history only one thing has proven truly inevitable: change. Sometimes change for the better, sometimes for worse, but change nevertheless. When OSPIRG was denied funding in last week's election, a change for the better occurred at this university. After 26 years of masquerading as a student group, the most convoluted, cultish and troublesome organization on campus was given a message: that the students of the University of Oregon are tired of being played for fools, and tired of being cheated. By now it is a well-known fact that OSPIRG was in fact not a real student group. For those of you who have not realized this, I'll break it down for you: OSPIRG (Oregon Student/State Public Interest Research Group) is a statewide organization that lobbies the government. It is not a student group, meaning that it is not run by students. OSPIRG here is run by a paid coordinator. The sole reason for OSPIRG's existence on the campuses of Oregon institutes of higher learning (UO, PSU, LCC and Lewis & Clark) is to collect student fees and pay the lobbying staff up in Portland. However, this does not mean the UO chapter does not spend any of this money on campus. It simply means that only a minute fraction of the $147,000 ever makes it back. I cannot tell you how much, possibly because it is not known by the common folks. It is a tightly-kept secret, because should the numbers ever be known, OSPIRG would find itself unwelcome here or anywhere else. This is what eventually came back and bit them in the ass. This whole charade has been going on since 1971, and hopefully, this last election will bring an end to it.

But why? Why, after allowing the OSPIRG debacle to go on for little over a quarter century, did students change their attitude?

OSPIRG has existed here for so long because nobody really did a whole lot about it. It was just a given that they would be here, year after year after year. A lawsuit was filed in 1995, in which 17 University students asked for the money that they paid to OSPIRG to be refunded. Their lawsuit never made it to trial, but it opened a debate. It made people scrutinize the way OSPIRG does things, how it spends its money. In 1996, the last time OSPIRG was on the ballot, their budget passed by a margin of about five hundred votes. Last year, Bill Miner and Ben Unger were elected to the ASUO Executive, and OSPIRG only seemed to get stronger. There was no organized campaign against them, and the status quo remained unshaken ... until this year.

This spring, on a shoestring budget of $177.30, the Honesty campaign waged war on OSPIRG. The Honesty campaign, spearheaded by junior Jonathan Collegio, ran a simple platform. The campaign urged potential student voters to consider where their money was going. If all of OSPIRG's campus activities were volunteer, then why did they need $147,000? Where was all of that money going? Why did OSPIRG refuse to present a line-item budget? What were they hiding? This was the first organized campaign ever assembled to get voters to "Rethink OSPIRG." Many students took a moment and re-evaluated their reasons for approving OSPIRG's budget, year after year. This scared the hell out of OSPIRG, and its minions, including many supporters for whom OSPIRG is technically not responsible. After the posters for Honesty went up each night, many of them would be found in the trash the next morning. The idea of opposition seemed to bewilder the folks who inhabit Suite 1 in the EMU. How dare anyone oppose their beloved OSPIRG, the champion of student rights and causes at the University? Even our student body president participated in the shenanigans. Bill Miner sent out a press release that was riddled with unsupported allegations. In it, he claimed the Honesty campaign was funded by "special interest, right-wing money," and that thousands of dollars were pouring in from conservative organizations. In fact, the majority of the supplies were paid for by Collegio himself, with several of his friends tossing small amounts of money in to supplement Collegio's contribution. One of the reasonable questions concerning the expenditures of this campaign regarded the cost of printing. The printing for the Honesty campaign was also a donation, coming from another friend of Collegio's. Quite a contrast was OSPIRG's expenditures. In the days before the election, OSPIRG spent approximately $770 on their campaign. Due to the fact that donations of more than $500 are illegal according to the ASUO elections code, more shiftiness and shadiness was applied to obtain this money. It would have been illegal for OSPIRG to use student fees for it's campaign, so the money was donated by the OSPIRG Foundation and Friends of OSPIRG. It is my opinion that these were simply vectors for the state PIRG to funnel money through, but I won't go into that, for there is more shadiness to come.

Given their past, I shouldn't have been so surprised that OSPIRG resorted to all manner of shiftiness to run their campaign. Peter Enslow, one of the coordinators for the Honesty Campaign, put it best. "In their office, corruption runs as thick as patchouli oil." Knowing that their whole campus operation is a twisted lie, I should have expected the depths to which they would sink. Like plague ridden rats cornered in their own sewer, they bit back with their diseased teeth. They employed the Campus Dirty Tricks Bureau (Bill and Bunger) along with an incompetent elections board to accomplish their goal. They tried half the tricks in the book, and a whole bunch of unpublished ones, yet they didn't succeed. In fact, it all backfired and blew up in their face.

They did not count on how adeptly the Honesty Campaign would be run. OSPIRG expected any campaign run against them to as sneaky, if not more than their own. Another thing OSPIRG seemed to forget is that they are not necessarily well liked on this campus. The assumption that OSPIRG has a huge student loyalty base is a myth, and all the campus needed to defeat them was mobilization. One of the major contributing factors to their downfall was their failure to present a line-item budget. Earlier this year, EMU finance senator Jenna Wasson attempted to pass a bill in the senate which would require all campus groups to present a line-item budget to the PFC. This in turn caused OSPIRG to show their true side, the true meaning of their existence. This caused OSPIRG to lobby. They lobbied the Senate hard, fought tooth and nail to preserve the status quo, and the bill was eventually voted down. This greatly disappointed Wasson, a former OSPIRG supporter, due to the fact she is a strong advocate on the senate for fiscal responsibility. With Wasson's defection from the Progressive slate and OSPIRG's buddy list, this gave Honesty an important ally.

A large percentage of the votes against OSPIRG were contributed by the average pissed off student, but that is not why they won. On the Monday night before the elections, representatives from the Honesty campaign went to the fraternity houses and campaigned for votes, and they got them. An overwhelming number of fraternity brothers got out to the ballot box to let their voice be heard, and it was. But it wasn't only the Greeks. ASUO Multi-Cultural Advocate Robert Wasson indicated that the ethnic student unions were a powerful voting base. No tricks here, all that needed to happen was that people were told the truth, and they voted accordingly.

On Wednesday, April 22nd, the U of O campus was taken by storm. Hundreds of "activists" took to the streets to thrust paper in the faces of the student population, trying to sway the undecided vote. Everywhere you looked, people with handbills, signs and even a bullhorn (that was quickly turned off, as per instruction by the Elections board). It was, excuse my language, a fucking zoo. I will admit, I too am guilty. I was one of the proprietors of handbills, and I too shoved paper in the face of every eligible voter that came across my path. This was the day, because on Thursday it rained cats and dogs. Few people were out on the street that day, except for some hardcore campaigners. It was a fitting day to precede the demise of OSPIRG.

I woke up at 10 a.m. on Friday, April 24th and immediately rushed to the Hamilton lobby to see the newspaper. I picked it up, and under "Wortman, Cowling Snatch Executive" I saw the headline I had been hoping for since I became a student here. It said "OSPIRG denied funding for the first time since '71." After a moment of shocked silence, I let out a head-turning holler. Not a yell, not a scream, but a good, old-fashioned country ass holler. I had a shit-eating grin on my face for the rest of the weekend. I knew the grievances would come, but it didn't matter. OSPIRG had been denied funding 53-47, by a margin of 143 votes out of over 2000. The students of the University had taken a stand against the graft and corruption which had existed here since 1971.

It was only the beginning. OSPIRG could not believe they were going to be tossed out on their shifty ass. They filed grievances, and bitched and moaned, but that's another story. This is about change, this is about a great wrong being righted. OSPIRG was denied funding not because people were against the environment and not because of a vast right-wing conspiracy. OSPIRG was denied funding because the information about their activities was made available to the general population. People voted against OSPIRG because they were simply tired of the bullshit. They finally realized, hey, we can do something about it, and they did, and the University of Oregon campus is better for it.

Chris Aster, a freshman majoring in Political Science, is a staff writer for the Oregon Commentator