Vote today or tomorrow in Student Senate elections
The sky's the limit
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Published since 1889 by the students of the University of Kansas
Details, page 2
Wednesday
April 8, 1987
Vol. 97, No. 128
(USPS 650-640)
Three mall opponents win City Commission seats
Former Lawrence City Commissioner Don Binns, left, waits with newly elected City Commissioner Bob Schumm and Schumm's wife, Sandra, for final election results at the Douglas County Courthouse, 11th and Massachusetts streets. Because Schumm received the most votes in yesterday's election, he will serve a four-year term
By TODD COHEN Staff writer
Staff writer
Former Lawrence City Commissioner Bob Schumm was swept back into office in an election yesterday that also saw two incumbents defeated by two opponents of a proposed downtown mall.
Schumm, Mike Rundle and Dennis Constance claimed the top three spots in the hotly contested election, which had been dominated by arguments over a proposed downtown mall. All three winners had opposed the mall project.
See stories, photos page 3
Constance said, "Lawrence is on the verge of a very important phase of its history. Let's get on it. I'm ready tonight."
Voters rejected the re-election bids of commissioners Ernest Angino and Howard Hill, Angina, a KU professor of civil engineering and geology, finished fourth, 483 votes behind Constance.
Hill, director of KANU, KU's public radio station, finished a distant fifth. Ellis Hayden, a retired baker who also had opposed the mail, finished sixth.
Rundle said of Angino, "He didn't seem to have full respect for his constituents, telling people naive and talking down to people."
Angino, who attended his last commission meeting last night, said, "If the public wants a change, they get a change. They get what they want. They get what they deserve."
Hayden said he was happy and content despite his sixth-place finish.
City Election Results
"For being 63 years old, I ran as
CITY COMMISSIONER
BOB SCHUMM 7,517 21.8%
Mike RUNE 6,172 12.9%
DENNIS D. CONSTANCE 6,143 17.9%
ERNEST E. ANGINO* 5,560 16.4%
HOWARD HILL* 4,713 13.7%
ELLIS R. HAYDEN 4,940 11.7%
Industrials important
ADVISORY REFERENDUM
Shall the following be adopted?
*Massachusetts Street and Vermont Street shall no be closed or vacated from Sth Street to Eleventh
be closed or vacated from Sixth Street to Eleventh Street *
Yes 9,910 78.4%
No 2,696 12.6%
Shall the following be adopted?
"The City of Lawrence, Kansas, shall spend public funds, be they state, federal or local, for the purpose of assisting in the building of an enclosed shopping mall in any business district of Lawrence, Kansas"
Yes 3,055 24.4%
No 9,518 75.6%
Shall the following be adopted?
"None of the business district of Lawrence, Kansas, shall be vaulted for the purpose of constructing an enclosed shopping mall!"
Yes 8,775 70.0%
No 3,757 30.0%
U. S.D. # 497 SCHOOL BOARD
SCIENCE INSTITUTE BOARD
MARY LOU WRIGHT* 7,087 18.6%
MAGGIE CARTAR* 7,015 18.6%
MARY L. LOVELAND 6,152 18.4%
HARRIET SHAFFER 5,579 14.8%
ROBERT PALMATEE* 5,571 14.8%
SUSAN MAFCFE 3,258 8.7%
CURT HALL 2,878 7.7%
*Indicates incumbent
fast as I could." Hayden said.
The results broke a long Lawrence tradition that the top three finishers in the primary also win the top three spots in the
general election. Schumm, Angino and Constance were the top three finishers in the March 3 primary
Last night, Rundle jumped from his fourth-place primary finish to second, besting Constance, who had finished third in the primary, and knocking Angino, who finished second in the primary, down to
Rundle said, "I certainly did not think the odds were in my favor."
The new commissioners will be sworn in at Tuesday's city commission meeting, replacing Hill, Angino and David Longhurst. Longhurst was defeated by three votes in the primary.
Still on the commission are Mayor Sandra Praeger and Commissioner Mike Amyx, whose terms expire in April 1989.
Schumm and Rundle will serve four-year terms, and Constance will serve a two-year term
Schumm, who owns two downtown restaurants, had served on the commission from 1979 to 1981 and has soundly defeated for re-election.
In his first bid for office since his defeat, Schumm won the support of groups on both sides of the mall issue.
Schumm attracted attention when he called, in the first candidate debate, for the city to seek a free-storing department store rather than a mail. He stuck to his position despite charges by the mall's developer that his ideas were unrealistic.
Schumm was the only candidate to be endorsed by both the Old West Lawrence Neighborhood Association-PAC and the Commerce's political action committee. Jobs for Tomorrow.
Rundle, a secretary in the KU
design department and a caller for the Lawrence Barn Dance Association, concentrated on neighborhood issues and opposed the mall in his first bid for public office.
Constance, house manager of Joseph R. Pearson Hall, also was in his first campaign He had worked on and emphasized neighborhood issues.
Constance and Rundle, both residents of Old West Lawrence, also were endorsed by OWL-PAC.
Mall opponents, who flooded the Douglas County Courthouse to watch the results come in, cheered
and congratulated each other and candidates when the final tally was announced.
Steve Lopes, president of OWL,
announced, "OWL-PAC is here to
stay. We're not going away."
A woman in the crowd yelled, "I can't believe we did it."
Lopes said of the defeated incumbents, "I think it's the incumbents failing to keep in touch. They didn't see this coming. This is an evaluation of them, and they flunked."
However, Duane Morris, chairman of Keep Downtown Downtown
Committee, which had supported the mall, said the incumbents were defeated solely because of the strong anti-mall vote.
"I don't think it relates to anything else that has happened in the city," he said.
Nancy Hambleton, former commissioner and co-chairman of Jobs for Tomorrow, said incumbents offered from having voting records.
"Everyone looks so pure when you're coming in with no voting record," she said.
Law says workers must prove eligibility
By BENJAMIN HALL
People who apply for jobs this summer will find they have to prove that they are citizens or can work legally, Lawrence and KU personnel administrators say.
"Effective June 1, we're going to have to verify that anybody we hire is eligible to work in this country." The director of personnel, said recently.
Under a new federal immigration law, universities and all other employers will be responsible for verifying that each person they have hired since Nov. 6 can work legally. Employers who fail to do so could be fined or imprisoned beginning in 1988.
The law will be an extra burden for employers and employees, although officials disagree about the extent of the burden.
"Very quickly people will get used to the idea that they're going to have to do it," he said.
He said student employees probably would be included in the ruling, but the court did not.
alization Service might change some aspects of the law before a 30-day comment period ends April 20.
'T there's a long list of possible acceptable documents.'
David Lewin K/1 director of personnel
KU director of personnel
"This is a complicated issue to which we don't have a lot of answers." Lewin said. "We're trying to assess the changes. We're trying to minimize the additional workload this would create."
Employers will have 24 hours after hiring a new employee to check documentation. The University of Kansas is working on verification procedures to distribute campus-wide. Lewin said.
He said employees could establish their identification and work eligibility with a passport; state-issued identification or a driver's license and a social security card; birth certificate and state-issued identification or a driver's license; or a document from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"There's a long list of possible acceptable documents," Lewin said. KUIDs would qualify as identification.
But the new procedures shouldn't be a problem an immigration service officer can anticipate.
Ted Moss, acting assistant director for investigations for the immigration service's district office in Kansas City, Mo., was on campus last week to discuss the new law with Lawrence and KU personnel administrators.
"The employers were not upset about the law per se," Moss said. They were just worried about the raiders. "They didn't know how to fill out the forms."
The immigration service probably will mail a new verification form to 8 million employers next month, Moss said.
"It should be no problem," he said.
"Most everybody who's allowed to stay here and work here has some documentation to say so.
"Congress is saying that if you take the jobs away, it will decrease illegal immigration."
Illegal aliens are living and working in western Kansas. Wheita and other residents of the city are
But Ray Hummert, director of personnel for the city of Lawrence, said employees, not employers, should be responsible for proving they could work legally.
"I think employees are only now understanding what their responsibilities will be," he said. "I think we should let our congressional delegation know about the burdens that will be placed on employers."
The new laws also will confuse potential employees. Hummert said.
"Employers are going to be askin for this information, and the employe-
Hummert said verifying the city's 200 summer employees would be the city's greatest burden.
INSIDE
Girl Scouts show college class the importance of sign language
The KU men's baseball team continued to struggle yesterday, losing two games to the School of the Ozarks. The Jayhawks have lost 10 straight and are winless in their last 15 games. See story page 13.
Still struggling
The girls, members of Girl Scout Troop 734 of Lawrence, used sign language yesterday to take the scouting oath in front of about 30 KU students in a beginning sign language class.
The classroom was still as three mall girls dressed in green solemnly pleaded for the school to stay closed.
Jan Simpson, 9, told the class afterward that she had learned sign language to earn a badge.
Their mouths were silent, but their hands were moving.
By CAROLINE REDDICK
Staff writer
"I thought it was fun," she said. "I don't know why. It was just fun, something to do. It's pretty easy to learn."
Heather Beyer, 10, said, "I thought it was fun because, like Ellin said, what if we run into somebody who's deaf? We could talk to them a little."
The leader of the Girl Scout troop, Lynne Renick, said she had asked Ellin Siegel-Causey, assistant professor of special education, to teach the troop's members sign language to them.
"The more they can talk to people, the better. And that's just one step in that direction," Renick said. "I hope they would have more tools to talk with people."
Siegel-Causey teaches the class that the girls signed in front of. It's a graduate-level course, but Siegel-Causey said she accepted students from any level because of the importance of communicating with deaf people.
"We're talking about people, and we all have special needs," she said. "Let's deal with each other as people, and one way to do that is to learn their language.
Siegel-Causei teaches signed English, in which the word order is exactly like English. She said a course offered through the music therapy department taught American Sign Language, in which the
word order and syntax are different from English.
"The total communication approach is what I teach, and it relies on everything," she said. "They learn to speak, read lips, sign, and use facial expressions, gestures and body language. That tends to be the way most young kids that are deaf will learn in the public school system."
Jennifer Stiles, Hutchinson senior,
said that she took Siegel-Causey's
course because she wanted to get a
master's degree in preschool education
for the deaf.
"It takes a while to get used to reading someone," she said. "Everybody has different hand positions."
"But I think deaf people should be included in our society, too. They have to learn spoken language in order to fit into our society, so why shouldn't we learn sign language to accommodate them somewhat?"
By TIM HAMILTON
GTAs to get refunds from taxed stipends
University of Kansas officials announced yesterday that the University would refund money withheld for taxes on fee waivers from graduate teaching assistants' paychecks in March and April.
The announcement came a little more than a week after the Graduate Student Council Executive Committee released a letter criticizing the University's interpretation of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the implementation of the tax on fee waivers.
In the letter, GradEx also called for a refund by April 15 of the taxes withheld.
Near the first of the year, the University determined that fee waivers for GTAs constituted compensation and were subject to taxation.
In March and April, amounts ranging from $5 to $150 were withheld by the University comptroller from the paychecks of 690 GTAs.
Vickie Thomas, University general counsel, said the fee waiver taxation issue hinged on the definition of compensation. Fee waivers could be considered scholarships or fellowships.
She said the University decided that fee waivers were taxable as income after consulting the American Council on Education, the Council of Graduate Schools and the
Board of Regents about the statute.
About 10 days ago, she received information from the Council of Graduate Schools that said the Internal Revenue Service wouldn't define what was considered compensation and what wasn't. Thomas said.
"But we've continued to collect information, and recently we decided that it is possible that fee remission doesn't constitute compensation." Thomas said.
The University confirmed that information with sources at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, she said.
Keith Nitcher, University director of business affairs, said that because of the uncertainty surrounding the tax law, the University's best available advice recommended the refund.
"The merits of withholding, the merits of refunding and the merits of the taxation have yet to be decided," Nitcher said.
Richard Augustin, assistant comptroller, said his office began last week, when the refund seemed imminent, to compile the names of GTAs who were taxed and the amounts withheld from each.
Augustin said that the refund checks might be sent out with the May paychecks and the majority of the refunds would be less than $35.
Bill may let Regents sell bonds for books
By CHRISTOPHER HINES
Staff writer
TOPEKA - Kansas public universities soon may be able to take the initiative to improve the quality of higher education despite continuing legislative budget cuts, a state senator said yesterday.
"We see no increase in revenues from the state," said State Sen. Norma Daniels, D-Dalley Center. "We need to provide the Regents institutions ways that they can, on their own, raise money."
Daniels drafted a bill that would allow the Board of Regents to issue
1
bonds to pay for books, laboratory equipment, computer hardware and software, and other educational materials. The bonds would be sold to the public and repaid by increasing tuition at each Regents school.
The money collected would be used to supplement what the state allocates for educational materials and resources. The state's contribution, Daniels said
"The purpose of the bill is to increase the amount of money spent by consumers on transportation."
See BONDS, p. 6, col. 3