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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
15
Monday, Sept. 9, 1985
Sticking it to consumers
But who will be the fall guy at Wolf Creek?
Paying for mistakes is easy if there's a fall guy in the wings.
The Kansas Corporation Commission meets this week to decide just how much consumers should pay for the over-budgeted Wolf Creek power plant.
The original cost estimate — announced in the early days of Wolf Creek planning before the plant's estimates became a periodic joke — was $1.05 billion.
The plant, which was put into commercial operation Tuesday, has been a thorn in the side of planners, investors and consumers since construction began. Now that it's time to pay, the utilities that built the plant want to shed their thorns. And the customers will be the ones that get stuck.
By 1964 it had grown to $2.57 billion. The Kansas Senate then said consumers should
not have to pay Wolf Creek costs that exceed original estimates if the excess was caused by "excess generating capacity and imprudent management." The Senate placed the unlikely ceiling of 200 percent on the cost overruns.
Now the cost has grown to $3.05 billion — almost 300 percent higher than original estimates — and the utilities are recommending a 64 percent, $237.6 million rate increase. The utilities want to phase in the increase over four years.
Granted, not all of the additional costs can be blamed on the utilities. Costs have risen since the Three Mile Island plant fizzled in 1979, and some sort of compromise rate increase is inevitable.
However, it appears that much of the cost overrun at Wolf Creek has been caused by faulty management and waste. If so, 460,000 consumers should not be forced to carry any bit of the $237.6 million thorn around with them.
Politics as usual
The business of Student Senate is supposed to be representing students, hashing out their views and helping to fulfill their needs on campus. But often, the business of the Senate seems to be squabbling.
It's called politics.
That's what Sandra Binyon, KU campus director of the Associated Students of Kansas, said she was protesting by resigning Wednesday.
Binyon said that between 10 and 15 senators, & Toto Too coalition members, were gumming up the entire process, preventing any constructive work.
& Toto Too's student body presidential and vice-presidential candidates finished second in last fall's elections. During the election, Binyon was chairman of Students for Frontier, a group supporting the Frontier Coalition, whose candidates won.
The infighting between the two groups apparently still goes on, despite the fact that.
officially, ties to coalitions are supposed to be cut after the election.
Intense politicking and absurd infighting permeate the Senate. Indeed, asking the Senate to refrain from political maneuvering and from rules manipulation is much like asking the same of the Kansas Legislature or the U.S. House of Representatives.
Citing manipulation of rules also seems ironic; Binyon was once a veteran student senator and has seen all this before. Some student senators recite and follow Robert's Rules of Order with a ruthless fervor that might have horrified Robert himself.
What perhaps is different now is that the other group is accused of doing the gumming up; they apparently have found that the politics of the establishment are effective. Having a legislative program frozen by politics is frustrating.
And sometimes getting out looks like the best action.
Falwell and Jackson
The Rev. Jerry Falwell let the Rev. Jesse Jackson speak at his church last week. It was an event that, if arranged for the sake of understanding, togetherness and religious solidarity, would have been universally cheered.
But Falwell's invitation to Jackson to speak to his Thomas Road Baptist Church congregation revealed more of the political nature of the Moral Majority king than a willingness to cultivate understanding
Last month, Falwell returned to the U.S. from a "fact-finding" tour of South Africa and insulted the blacks of South Africa and their Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader.
His typically one-sided tirade was based on conversations with pro-apartheid South Africans and deservedly opened him up for considerable criticism. And that is no doubt why he felt the need to invite a black U.S. leader to speak to his congregation.
He called Bishop Desmond Tutu a "phony" and said the majority of blacks in South Africa approved of apartheid.
Falwell's face-saving invitation was healthy on the surface, and no one should blame Jackson for jumping at the opportunity. But Falwell's political cards are on the table, and his seemingly conciliatory gesture was as genuine as a forced surrender.
Rob Karwath
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Stull might welcome loud parties
Out of Bounds somewhere along the fast lane to city hall.
The University of Stull. Write it on a t-shirt with a Magic Marker and try it on for size.
Buf wait a minute! Why are we fighting anyway?
That's where battle lines are being drawn between Out of Bounds party hogs and the Lawrence City Commission over the issue of blow-out parties and the right of citizens to go to bed at 9 o'clock on a Friday night
And judging from the language already being strenued about in the tranches, this verbal battle of the loud party may get noisy enough to violate the city's own proposed noise ordinance, which could go into effect in Lawrence in the near future.
Therefore, the only responsible action we at Out of Bounds headquarters can come up with to avoid the noise is to pack our university up right now. Load it onto U-Hauls and move KU to Stull, 14 miles southwest of Lawrence.
You see, college students tend to drink a lot of beer and chase it down with ample doses of loud music. It's a fast life, squeezing enough good times out of the few non-studying hours we have.
Because some party hogs don't seem to know when they've gone too far Out of Bounds. And because some citizens and commissioners don't seem to have accepted the reality that they are living in a special environment.
The whole mess began a few weeks ago when citizens, who at one time had decided to live in this distinctively college town, began raising the issue of noisy fraternity parties. Specifically the Stewart Street Bash, Commissioners decided to begin thinking about regulating large organized parties where more than 200 people pay a beer fee to attend.
That's the nature of things.
City halls, however, tend to work slowly and they tend to regulate.
That's the nature of things too.
Gary Smith
That's the nature of things.
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Staff columnist
Commissioner Ernest Angino — who noted during a recent commission meeting that some students' behavior at parties was "asinine" — told Out of Bounds last week that he'd like to see stiff fines with possible imprisonment levied against the inhabitants of houses where loud parties cause the police to issue more than two noise warnings.
It a become a problem," Angioin said, "because I believe that young people these days really like to listen to lead, blaring music.
"And to help enforce any noisy ordinance we come up with, I'd like to see all the police here armed with audiometers so we can measure the noise level and convict with evidence."
Angino also said he didn't care that
several Country Club weekend parties were shut down on the third complaint before 11:30 p.m., and one before 9:30 p.m.
"Those who complain certainly have rights," said KU graduate and lifelong Lawrence resident John Frydman, "but getting a party shirt down before midnight on a weekend is a pretty thin-skilled to do while living in a college town."
Frydman said he was sure the good landowners of Stull could adapt to the traditional pre-midnight noise level associated with a college community. He said all the added income and growth such a move would bring with it.
And with Clinton Lake so close to Stull, what's stopping the party hop from taking the opportunity at new SU to trash the Jayhawk as mascot replace it with a largemouth bass and begin throwing quiet fishing parties instead?
The University of Stull. It's tin has come.
Teacher tried to offer the value of learning
He tried to teach us the value of learning. He had a unique manner of imparting his message. Where so many teachers pointed out the high and lofty benefits of intellect, Mr Klein got our attention by talking bluntly. Wealth and poverty, that's what it's all about, he would say.
Robert C.
Maynard
Oakland Tribun
Oakland Tribune
The beginning of a school year always provides an opportunity to catch a glimpse of some favorite incident in the mirror of time. For me, the incident is about a math teacher. Mr. Klein taught math at Boys High School in Brooklyn for 30 years. He was close to retiring when he taught me in Algebra 1.
"Hey, stupid," he would call out to an unattentive student, "stand up." The hapless victim would stand, "Ever been on the A-train or any other subway? What does the conductor do there, son."
It is unclear whether Einstein himself could have taught me math at that point in my life. I had already been smitten by another subject. My desire to write was so intense that nothing else could have caught my interest. And Klein was no Einstein.
Why, then, do I have such a distinct recollection of a teacher in a subject about which I cared so little? It is because Mr. Klein imparted a more important lesson than how to find the value of "x" in an equation.
The victim would stretch out his arms to an imaginary mechanism and pretend to activate the door controls of the subway train.
"Click, click!" Mr. Klein would sing out. "Click, click, goes the subway door. That's for the guys that don't finish school. You wanna be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a firefighter, an engineer, a wise life. A lifetime of 'click, click'."
These days, with unions and other changes in the system, I imagine subway conductors in New York City do pretty well for themselves, but in those days, it was one of the lowest-paying, most menial jobs we as students could imagine. Today, there are fewer and such jobs, and those that exist attract better-educated employees than they did 30 years ago.
Some of our algebra problems
included calculating the lifetime earnings of some occupations versus others.
"Figure it out, boys. Figure it out and work. I don't want to dump a bunch of dummies on the streets of graphic picture of where poorly educated people landed on the social landscape."
Now, the Wall Street Journal has named the kind of people Mr. Klein was railing against. The other day it called them "yuffies," meaning young, urban failures. Just when people that we used to call "yuppies" say they resent the term, another group has been branded with another cutesy '80s label.
The label might be cute, but the problem is anything but that. While yuppies are known for their expensive tastes, yuffies are known for their expensive social cost. The problem is the degree to which we as a society have failed to understand that cost and have failed to grasp the need for a set of national policies that addresses the swelling ranks of the permanent underclass.
Long before we had a term to describe the permanently poor, Mr. Klein recognized the compelling importance of education as the one vital weapon against poverty and social chaps.
Were we to reach a national consensus to destroy the disease of ignorance, we would discover rather quickly that a number of other social disorders would disappear along with it.
The great difficulty is the lack of appreciation for one fact about ignorance. It does not imprison only the ignorant. It imprisons all of us. A trip through any correctional facility will tell you why this is so. About 80 percent of that population will turn out to be functionally illiterate.
Our society correctly places the responsibility for behavior squarely on the individual. Unfortunately, that assessment overlooks the great variation in the quality of education available to people based on race and class.
We were lucky those days in Brooklyn. Many of us came from close-knit families, and we had teachers who took pride in a tradition of educational training. Anyone in government who takes responsibility for trying to restore that pride across the land would be doing the country its greatest favor.
Verbatim
In The Streets editors George Frazier, left, and John Chappell
'Streets' offers alternative
In the Streets, a monthly campus newspaper, published six issues last semester.
Three of the paper's six current editors — John Chappell, Overland Park sophomore, George Frazier, Overland Park sophomore; and Craig Krueger, Sioux City, Iowa, senior, talked about the paper last week with staff columnist Julie Comine.
In the Streets received $2,664 from Student Senate for the 1985-86 academic year to cover printing costs, but none of its editors or contributors are paid.
Some people might call In the Streets an underground newspaper. How would you characterize yourselves?
FRAZIER. We want to make it an open forum for students — a place where they can express their ideas on art and on the University system in general. Ideologically, you could say we're on the left, but we certainly don't close our eyes to the right.
Who can write for in the Streets?
CHAPPELL: Anyone can say what he wants, as long as he says it intelligently and within the bounds of libel laws.
CHAPPELL: Definitely. We use a lighter touch when dealing with certain issues, but we're not trying to be completely serious or completely sarcastic.
In the Streets seems to be a mixture of news, opinion, poetry, crossword puzzles, cartoons, sarcasm. (The paper occasionally runs news stories under the byline "DAP — Disassociated Press.") Do you think people take the paper seriously?
Last May you published a four-page issue devoted entirely to South Africa and the anti-apartheid protests on campus.
which featured two stories written by the protesters themselves. Do you think that issue was balanced? KRUEGER: We weren't going to come out at the time, but somebody had to cover it. (The Kansas stops publishing before finals week.) I wrote a front-page story on the Endowment Association's position, with comments from (Endowment Association president) Todd Seymour. But obviously it wasn't totally balanced because of the reluctance of the Chancellor to answer questions on the issue.
What do you see as the Kansan's weaknesses?
KRUEGER: The only way to get something in the Kansan is to write a guest column or letter, and even then there's no guarantee that it will get published. There are 25,000 students at this school and 25 student writers on the Kansan.
But don't you think the Kansan serves a purpose as a forum or training ground for students who have decided to pursue careers in journalism?
KRUEGER: Sure. (He picks up a recent issue of the Kansan and opens to the editorial page.) But why do they run these Washington D.C. columns? Why do they have, you ask? What's the best way to read UPI stories, they can buy the Lawrence Journal-World or the Kansas City Star.
CHAPPELLE: We're not in competition with the UK. The Kansas can be is to print the news. We can't really cover hot, breaking news because we are a monthly.
Do you think there's room for both papers on campus?
KRUEGER: I think there's room for 20 papers.