THE UNIVERSITY DARY KANSAN
NEWS
3A
STUDENT SENATE ELECTIONS 2009
Students of Liberty seeks green efforts, no fee hikes
Platform also includes more accountability within Senate leadership
BY BRIANNE
PFANNENSTIEL
bpfannentiel@kansan.com
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 sena-
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.
Wood
Wilson
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, espe-
cally 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 non-revenue 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 Department, 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.
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'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
CRIME
Funeral held for last victim of gruesome murder scene
BY ANDALE GROSS
Associated Press
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As the last of the four victims in a suburban Kansas City slaying case was laid to rest Tuesday, police continued to investigate the killings that community members were calling the work of a "monster."
No arrests have been made in the slayings in the suburb of Raytown, and it's unclear whether investigators are any closer to charging someone.
The service for the final victim, 33-year-old Andre Jones Sr., was held Tuesday inside a packed Kansas City funeral home. Some mourners wore T-shirts with the words "Help Us Catch a Monster!" printed on them, along with photos of the victims: Jones, his 21-year-old girlfriend, Precious Triplett, and Triplett's nephews, 10-year-old Amir Clemons and 7-year-old Gerard Clemons. A funeral for Triplett and the boys was held Monday.
"An animal did what's taken place here," community activist Alvin Brooks told mourners at Tuesday's service, adding there was no acceptable explanation for the killings.
Jones' father, Huey Ross, lamented the deaths and other recent homicides.
STATE
Two die in collision with school bus near Topeka
ROSSVILLE — Two people are dead after their car collided with a school bus in the northeast Kansas town of Rossville.
"This killing among us is just ridiculous," Ross said to those who gathered to remember his son.
The Shawnee County Sheriff's Department told The Topeka Capital-Journal the bus driver was flown to a Topeka hospital with serious injuries from the crash Tuesday afternoon.
Amir and Gerard were on spring break from school and had gone to the apartment the night before to stay with their aunt. The boys' father found the bodies when he went to the apartment after not hearing from them.
Investigators declined to say how the four victims were killed. But Raytown police Capt. Ted Bowman said detectives who saw the scene described the killings as "nothing short of vicious."
The four victims were found dead March 16 in a Raytown apartment. Triplet's 18-month-old son was there, but was not harmed.
Those who knew the victims said they didn't know why anyone would kill them.
Some neighbors said they thought they heard gunshots, but investigators have not said whether the victims were shot.
"This is a hard one," said Sean Williams, a brother-in-law of Jones, as he and other mourners left the funeral home Tuesday. "It just doesn't make sense. These were senseless murders. Andre was such a good man. And Precious didn't deserve this, or the kids.
"They better get who did this."
Three children, ages 5, 10 and 11, were on the bus when the collision happened around 3:30 p.m. on U.S. 24. Emergency crews evaluated the children, but officials said their injuries weren't considered life-threatening.
Rossville is about 15 miles northwest of Topeka.The crash closed the highway while emergency crews responded to the accident.
THIS WEEK ON CAMPUS funded by Student Senate
Associated Press