By snoadmin
The Associated Students, Inc. executive officers 2007-08 must have been asleep at the good-conscience wheel when they decided to drive Cal State Long Beach students nearer to the poor house with their BlackBerry cravings. Worse still, ASI covered its communications co-dependency from June through October with our money.
While the rest of us were busting our humps during the summer to pay for threatened tuition increases, textbooks, rent, food and every other imaginable local survival cost, ASI was communicating on a national level with student-paid-for trinkets, under the auspice of serving our collegiate community.
So far, that’s taking a mild approach at explaining what ASI has refused to adequately justify, namely a $22,000-plus tab for yakking their faces off while most of us were sweating blood.
Frittering away a paltry 22-grand-and-change out of a more than $3.2 million community budget might seem inconsequential to the naked eye, but for threadbare students dumping their hard-earned paychecks into that pool, frivolity by an elected official is unconscionable.
Imagine the communication a starving student – or several – could afford with that meager drop in the bucket.
At a penny under $50 a month, 440 CSULB students could get 600 anytime minutes for one month through T-Mobile’s national offer. No fewer than 550 students, who can’t afford Internet (and there are potentially at least that many), could have DSL access through AT&T for the same 30-day period.
In perspective, nearly 140 of those cash-strapped Beach denizens who are economically deprived of the World Wide Web could enjoy research capability for the similar June through October billing period – if they weren’t slaving away at second and third summer jobs.
Here are some other needs-based items ASI could have considered from the short list.
At least 200 students could have bought parking permits next semester and money would have been left in the cash register. More than 200 students might have been assisted with $100 textbook grants and, even then, ASI would still be able to afford a slammin’ keg party.
ASI might have considered helping 100 low-income students with $200 scholarships. ASI could have shown largesse with our money and still been able to pat themselves on the back with an extravagant do-gooder banquet.
The elected body could have practically carpeted and computerized an entire CSULB ghetto for less money.
“Slap in the face” The Sequel:
In the interest of finding out why these gadgets were necessary for five ASI reps and the “15 professional employees,” who apparently share the BlackBerry habit, the Daily Forty-Niner was literally snubbed.
Forty-Niner investigations editor Lauren Williams made multiple requests for complete records of correspondences, only to be offered feeble misinterpretations of ASI’s accountability responsibilities under the California Public Records Act and other state “Sunshine” laws.
ASI Executive Director Richard Haller sent an e-mail claiming, “The Associated Students, Inc., unlike the university, is not a state agency, but rather a separately incorporated nonprofit association that is recognized by the California State University as an auxiliary organization.”
We hate to burst bubbles (actually, we don’t), but somebody better study the CPRA printed version before thumping a fictitious and erroneous declaration that has legal implications about a statewide transparency mandate.
Section 6252, parts (a) and (b), titled “Who’s Covered,” lists the following: “All state and local agencies, including: (1) any officer, bureau, or department; (2) any “board, commission or agency” created by the agency (including advisory boards); and (3) nonprofit entities that are legislative bodies of a local agency.”
As private as ASI tries to hope and pretend it is, what area it fails to qualify for is private domain. It survives on money surrendered to the student coffers of a public university, with state and federal financial aid ties and obligations.
It is a nonprofit organization under a state agency umbrella. Its officers are elected and they are not allowed to operate in secret, except under certain explicitly defined business contract or real estate negotiating circumstances.
Under the same Section 6252, part (e), titled “What’s Covered,” ASI must surrender records that “[I]nclude all communications related to public business ‘regardless of physical form or characteristics, including any writing, picture, sound, or symbol, whether paper, magnetic or other media.'”
Secrecy is not what ASI leaders promised the student body last spring when seeking election.
According to the rules of the game, ASI leaders have “10 days to decide if copies will be provided.” If they determine not to turn records over, they “must justify the withholding of any record by demonstrating that the record is exempt or that the public interest in confidentiality outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
It might be difficult to claim either these exemptions and, most assuredly, they can’t claim keeping these demands out of public reach is in the “interest of national security.” Yet they still refuse to allow many of the requested records to be scrutinized.
BlackBerry records do not meet those exemptions.
“Slap in the face” The Saga Continues:
It’s hard to conceive any viable reason student leaders, or their employees, could find a need to exercise such poor fiscal judgment, especially when it isn’t their fiscals they are “judgmenting.”
The situation certainly seems to be an anomaly, because no other university we’ve had contact with will ‘fess up to toting student-funded BlackBerries. Most have figured out how to have custodians and recycling coordinators survive with walkie-talkies and cell phones.
Compounding these egregious acts by delivering what amounts to “no comment” when not providing full disclosure is yet another slap in the student face (see “Slap in the face” The Sequel). It only increases suspicion over other ways ASI might possibly be dipping into the student fund for undeserving luxuries.
Before we start bandying about terms like malfeasance, embezzlement and misappropriation by fellow students, we’d like to think they actually have our best interests at heart. We’d like to believe that perhaps, just maybe, they were ill-advised.
Rather than complying with the all-inclusive records requests and trying to figure out where they screwed up by screwing fellow students, though, the ASI will read this article looking for loopholes or flaws in the opinion. Good.
With a running tab of $22,046 over four months (which averages out to about $275 per month per addict), one would hope ASI was at least getting oxygen and nutrition from the electronic devices.
It’s frightening to imagine what the November and December bills will be when considering it’s the holiday season and their need to reach out and touch a whole lot of somebodies.
One problem, ASI folks – this is not your money.
