Allowing students to vote on campus fees is a bad idea

By Sara Nydam |Staff Writer|

The State Senate Education Committee is considering a new bill that I believe would waste a lot of your time and money.

If SB-960 is passed “any new campus-based mandatory fees, other than those for instructionally related purposes, cannot be established without an affirmative vote of the student body,” according to the bill.

Having the entire student body vote on campus fees may seem like a good idea, but it’s not. I believe the Education Committee should vote against SB-960 because this bill would translate into a lot of time spent trying to get students to vote on campus fees.

Mandatory fees are determined by a Fee Advisory Committee and “at least half of the members must be students,” according to the CSU Budget Office.

The committee has been given the right to make these decisions for a reason, which is why I believe we should let our trustworthy board of fee advisers  continue making these hard decisions for us. I think students that support this bill are being selfish rather than looking at the big picture.

“Elections could be time-consuming and cost $25,000 on average,” according to The Daily Californian. I believe issues that may be urgent cannot withstand an entire election process when a decision must be made in a timely manner.

It could take a full quarter to get the information to voting students. If this bill is passed, it will be especially difficult to collect votes effectively when not all students are on campus daily.

Another issue is the cost of holding an election open to the entire student body. Predicting the cost at around $25,000 per election it is a large amount of money that will be coming out of our pockets.

Of course students could care less about that money because they do not realize the money is being taken out of their taxes rather than their tuition.

Students need to be aware of what may be a huge obligation as well as a huge mistake. We all know what happens when power is put in the hands of the wrong people.

“The bill would go too far to restrict the administration’s authority,” according to The Huffington Post.
If this bill is passed power will be taken away from the committee.

I am fearful that if all power is taken from the committee students will not have access to the amount of knowledge necessary to make  decisions that will directly effect our entire campus.

I do not believe I will have enough time to research into these matters with all of my current obligations and neither will you.

“In any type of vote people never have the necessary information to make an informed decision,” said student Casandra Tulleys. “It would be nice for students to feel like they have a choice but it might be counter productive.”

You may know some information on the topic but that does not make you qualified to make a decision that will affect the fees of the over 17,500 students who are enrolled here.

I believe the committee, consisting of students and staff, is capable enough to make decisions for the student body. Passing this bill would just eat up more resources that I don’t think we can afford to lose.