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Friday, February 10, 1978
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editorial represent the opinion of the Kanan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
The current Student Senate endured its term this week in predictable fashion. In a repeat performance of its lethargy during last fall's budget hearings, not enough students present to establish a quorum. Once again, the Senate was inept in dealing with important issues.
One of those issues was a resolution calling for large increases in the salaries of Senate executives. It was dismissed without a vote when one senator asked for a quorum count. Just 43 of 106 senators were at the meeting; 53 were needed.
That meeting was the last for the current Senate. The salary-increase resolution will have to go back to a new committee under a new Senate. It is a miserable way for the senators to end their terms.
THROUGHOUT THE Senate's administration during the last year, poor attendance has diluted its effectiveness. The budget hearings, for example, reflect the organization's main function, which is to disburse student activity fee monies to campus organizations. The apparent lack of concern for such expenditures could only
indicate a growing level of apathy concerning campus politics.
It doesn't have to be that way, nor was it at the Senate's inception at the turn of the decade. The Senate was founded to give students a real voice in University governance, a primary demand of protesters during the 1960s.
REGARDLESS of the leaders' credit or blame, however, individual senators must shoulder the responsibilities that their officiating role entails for new senators to show up for meetings.
senators to show up. Can the new senators put into office in next week's elections improve the dismal record of this year's Senate? Campus government at all levels, by no means just the Senate, requires interested participants. That most basic idea should be kept in mind when considering the candidates.
It is difficult to pinpoint the reason behind the Senate's recent yawning at its responsibilities. But perhaps there is indeed some validity to charges that outgoing leaders of the Senate, including Steve Leben, student body president, did not do their very best to involve every senator in the organization's decision-making.
Why would a democratic state representative from Lawrence, Mike Glover, push a bill that requires constituents strongly oppose?
Bill would force city to bargain
He would do it because he sees Lawrence officials acting petulantly about relations with the city's public employees.
Glover's bill would require all Kansas cities and counties to follow the existing Public Employee-Employee Relations Act. The cities must recognize a bargaining agent and conduct talks with their employees, if necessary, at contract renewal time. If talks reached an impasse, the state Public Employee-Employee Relations bill would issue an advisory opinion.
LAWRENCE MAYOR
Marrie Argeringer testified, at hearings on the bill last week,
that the city is already following the law in spirit. She said the bill was unnecessary.
Similarly, a Lawrence City Commission resolution declares that the city operates in good faith and already conducts bargaining sessions just as Glover's bill specifies.
The resolution states that abandoning the voluntary element of the emperor's act infringes into home rule for local government. Home rule refers to the power a city has to make its own ordinances independent of the state. Argersinger said the mayor's failure." She said before the House Labor and Industry Committee that although bargaining sometimes wasn't easy for the city and its citizens, we worked out our differences."
John Mitchell
Editorial writer
Her opinions, however, are not shared by all public employees. David Reavis, chairman of the Lawrence Police Officers Association, says that city officials use bargaining "when it suits their purpose."
LAWRENCE POLICEMEN have been through two recent controversies in contract talks with the city. In summer 1977, talks broke down, leading to a work slowdown by police, 1978, when a citizen-steaming "speedup" tactic was used.
If the bill were passed, Reavis said Tuesday. "We would give up the right to any concert by us," the negotiators) would keep
talking. When we went into a slowdown last year, it was because they just decided. "We are going to talk to you any more."
With the city required to bargain, Reavis said, it "would have to keep talking with us, and we would keep providing good services." That means no one would need to force the city's hand.
THE BILL mandates the kind of bargaining that Lawrence has been using. It is not binding arbitration, in which a third party is brought in to provide a binding opinion; it is meet-and-confer bargaining, in which the client agrees with an agent for the employee. The city has the final decision in any case.
Although Glover says the legislation is not aimed specifically at Lawrence, he added that it is designed to conditions in his home town. He said Wednesday, "An underlying problem here is the autocratic attitude that the City has about public employees."
"They say, 'We're meeting and conferring.' The employers are really saying, 'We'll meet, but we don't recognize you.' "
City officials whine that their rights are being taken away. Their right to deny public employees a bargaining voice
would indeed be removed. The bill is needed to do that.
Police still remember when the city exercised its right to ignore. Last summer in the police dispute, the city's chief negotiator, Assistant City Manager Mike Wildeng, refused to discuss several matters of warfare with representatives of the police officers' association. The association wanted talks set up under the employee relations act, but Wilden declined.
GLOVER SAID he thought that the argument advanced by Arersinger, that the bill would deprive Lawrence of some of the self-governance assured by home rule, had a hollow ring. And we are taking away is the rule to be arbitrary. "Glover said."
With the Public Employee-Employer Relations Board existing to review city labor and management, city's reports would be fairer and more accurate. He recalled the survey that the city conducted last summer to help keep police pay for policemen and firemen.
"I lawwireme out looking good," Glover said. "But the city management picked the particular Kansas town to be our public employee to. They left out some of the larger ones. I think the
board would take a broader view.
"The only thing the city has to fear is disclosure of facts, figures and working conditions that we are not particularly proud of."
THE COMMITTEE is expected to vote on the bill sometime next week. A companion bill is working its way through a Senate committee. It represents the same thing: Kansas cities and counties must invoke meet-and-confer bargaining.
A bill that tells any group it must do something should be carefully debated. Unjustified coercion will not do. But a bill that says governments must be fair may be needed, parlayed, or ignored, being acting churlishly about its workers' pay requests.
The opposition of the city to Glover's bill certainly can be understood. So can the opinion of a restaurant manager who "reserves the right to refuse service to anyone."
It might be that the city, left to itself, would carry out negotiations in the future with its current owner to recognize an agent for the employees. It might be that the city would release all facts of all negotiations fairly and accurately without help from a
Status quo binders use of solar energy
But it would be nice to be sure.
Solar energy technology probably will not become widespread in American homes until 1985. And it would take at least two decades of American homes will be equipped with solar energy apparatus, according to the Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation, published in March.
Yet solar energy gurus abound. Like the ancient Egyptian iconoclast, Akhenaten, who replaced all the temple deities with statues dedicated to the sun, solar energy advocates indefatigably proselytize unintuitated energy consumers.
Their adoration of the sun is well founded. About half a billionth of the sun's energy is absorbed by the earth. Over much of the earth's surface, sunlight reaches to the ground at a rate of about 100 kilowatt-hour per square meter. Energy we use comes from the sun, whether by windmill or wood-burning stove.
THOMAS DEAN, professor of architecture and urban design, uses a liquid-cooled collector in his rural Lawrence house in combination with a heat pump. The heat pump and the solar collector follow the principle of synergism. This means that together, they produce more energy than the sum of their energy production considered separately. Two plus two equals five in this case.
If we live in this sea of surging photons and plentiful radiant energy, why are official predictions of the solar energy future so dim?
There are few military applications of solar energy technology, beyond powering satellites. Spin-off applications of military technology account for much of our plethora of redundant gadgets, conveniences and amenities.
SOLAR ENERGY collectors represent a revolution in living. Decentralized power generation goes against the grain of energy suppliers' visions. A society that is plugged into power generating plants is like a fetus, connected to its mother by a life-sustaining umbilical cord. It's a century American way of doing things; God forbid that we should become more self-reliant.
Solar energy, beyond the cost of installation of collecting equipment, is free. The prospects of a plentiful and clean source of energy across the globe is novel enough to disturb status quo world leaders. International tensions would be alleviated if nations came available to developing nations. Tropical areas of the world would find themselves with a proportionately greater share of the sun's energy than the more developed areas of the temples. And these developments would be lost to members of industrialized nations in cold climate.
Architects estimate that there are more than 5,000 homes in the United States employing solar energy-collecting equipment for space and water heating, the biggest parts of residential energy bills.
is a homeowner really saving money when he decides it’s too expensive to install solar energy equipment? The cost of installing solar panels will eventually be passed on to the consumer.
INSTITUTIONAL PROBLEMS account for most of the pessimism about the future role of solar energy. Homeowners feel the installation cost of solar energy equipment is too big a burden. A family of four spends more than 10 per cent of their income on the bill is expected to quadruple during the next decade. Electricity, which costs about three-and-a-half cents a kilowatt hour in Lawrence, compares
Probably the first group of people who will use solar energy equipment will be homeowners who are burning natural gas. As the price of natural gas—now far below the market level—rises, the benefits of expiring sunshine will become attractive.
favorably with the national average cost of a kilowatt hour, about six cents.
Scenarios describing the future energy consumption habits of Americans often gloss over the changes in values that have shaped the nation, but they may replace the "chicken in every pot" promised Americans a few generations ago. In any case, a rebirth of the undatable and self-reliant American economy fears that there are no more challenges.
ANOTHER GROUP of people who may install solar equipment will be the entrepreneurs. Federal subsidies for installation of solar equipment would be one way of encouraging introduction of solar equipment into the building market.
To the editor:
In a commentary by one of your editorial writers last week, the quality of medical care
Watkins unfairly pictured
Raise interest rates for home money
BY RICHARD P. COOLEY
N V Times Features
By RICHARD P. COOLEY
The U.S. housing industry has been through seven boom-and-bust cycles of increasing severity since World War II. In most cases, these cycles were preceded by periods of disintermediation—which means that borrowers can access accounts in banks and thrift institutions while returns on other investments soared above these institutions' legally enforced savings interest rates. Because savings accounts are the primary source of mortgage money, this outflow reduced the demand for loans available for financing homes.
THE FIRST proposal to help savers and the housing industry nationwide involves urging the Federal Reserve Board and the state to mediate step of raising the interest walls on new consumer time deposits nationwide, by 1 or 2 percent, a move that does not require Congressional approval. Action should be taken immediately to moderate the possible effects of disintermediation on housing.
I have two specific actions to suggest that might help alleviate, if not avert altogether, the downturn in the housing cycle.
Something must be done to help assure the housing industry of a continuous supply of financing, especially when in times of economic downturn instruments, such as Treasury bills, are moving up.
Second, just as the Federal Reserve Board and Congress allowed the experiment in New England of paying interest on checking accounts, I propose that Congress allow us to conduct an interest rate control on these accounts to see all ceilings on consumer savings interest rates suspended in our state, as a test project, to see whether this move would give financial institutions the
flexibility they need to fight disintermediation. New accounts would be limited to residents of California.
In the United States, thrift institutions and commercial banks together make about two thirds of all loans nearly 90 percent of all residential construction loans. California commercial banks have about half of their consumer savings invested in mortgages. They make about 19 percent of our state's mortgage loans.
OF COURSE, commercial banks are committed to housing in more ways than mortgages
alone. A study during the first quarter of 1977 showed that nationwide, commercial banks had nearly $19 million invested in obligations of federal agencies and had about $77 million invested in residential support facilities such as sewers, streets and
oner utilities; we provided about $6 billion in home improvement loans; and we provided credit assistance to the housing industry less directly through the loans we make to borrowers. We save savings and loan associations themselves, mortgage bankers,
life insurance companies and real estate investment trusts.
The 1974-75 downtown saw housing starts by nearly 1.5 million units—as many or more units than were built in most years of the 1960s. At the bottom of the cycle, reached in March 1975, the rate of housing starts rose to about 32 percent below the level of the previous year and 61 percent below the cycle's peak in October 1972, when a record rate of housing units—2.5 million on an annual basis—were started. There is a real possibility that the manner in which the financial pipeline to housing is turned on and through the entire homebuilding industry out of kilter.
Some of the problems in the homebuilding and home financing picture are because of inflation, some are because of construction because of the composition of the homebuilding industry itself. Nonetheless, I firmly believe many are because of the artificial restraints on rates imposed by the federal government.
THE disintermediation-cased interruptions in the flow of funds have been contributing to the cycles in housing, and the ups and downs seem to be getting progressively steeper.
Raising the ceiling on consumer savings interest rates will give financial institutions the flexibility to meet the needs of the housing industry in periods when money market rates are high. It is an important step because the Federal reserve policymakers can and do take immediately. It is a move that would benefit consumers both as savers and as home buyers.
Richard P. Cooley is president and chief executive officer of Wells Fargo & Company, San Francisco. This article is adapted from a speech given in Houston.
available at Watkins Memorial Hospital was generally pictured as poor. This was, I think, an unfair representation.
Although it is laudable that the Kansan looks at campus affairs from the viewpoint of the student, I am sure that it was this perspective that helped me to understand misunderstanding, at least in one incident cited by the writer. There is grave doubt in my mind that anyone at Watkins Hospital babbled about surgery, as the writer's friend reported: Surgery is one of the most performed there. I am inclined to think that the student who told this particular horror story seriously misunderstood what he or she was told, in which case the propounding of the student's viewpoint led the writer away and exact truth of the matter.
When you stop to think how frequently even close friends misunderstand each other, it is easy to see how the specialists let the student know everything that is going on, could be misunderstood by patients who are already under physical or mental stress. The student is not to blame for this state of mind and should be a medical personnel who are making extraordinary efforts to
KANSAN Letters
treat the student as a person while they treat his or her alment.
Steve Hicks
Steve Hicks
Lawrence graduate student
Union alcohol irrelevant issue To the editor
Concerning the passage of a bill allowing liquor consumption in the Kansas Union, he has relevance to, nor will it benefit, the vast majority of the student body. The only ones who can possibly be admitted to public administration. It will just be another excuse for the well-breed (or well-fed, we can't decide) alumni and Archie Dykes, luc Max Lacus and Clyde Harty after the football games.
We, the concerned students, think that if the Kansas mayor wants to major crisis in a matter of days, surely it should have the energy crisis and all our other problems resolved in no time at all.
Rick Larsen, Lawrence senior Rick Scheuber, Lawrence senior
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
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