With an April 16-18 date finally set for the elusive ASUO general election, members of the Multicultural Center are making sure they’ll be ready if their $18,555 ballot measure passes a student vote.
If students approve the increase in the incidental fee, the MCC will have to change its bylaws so that MCC Board members are elected in the student election, and those members are “viewpoint neutral.”
The measure, which would establish a cultural programming fund that the MCC could give to other student groups for speakers and events, survived a challenge to its legality in an ASUO Constitution Court hearing last term.
Glen Banfield, a former court justice who represented the MCC in its March 16 court hearing, said the group can make the changes to the board before the court-imposed 2003 deadline.
“It just causes more bureaucracy for people who want to be on the MCC Board,” he said.
MCC Public Relations Coordinator Brandy Alexander said if the group needs to change, it will probably also add more positions to the board to include extra voices. Currently, the board has 11 voting members and one community at-large member.
“The more people the better,” she said. “The specifics will come when we have the actual money.”
But recent legal decisions may bar the MCC — an umbrella organization representing all the campus multicultural unions — from considering a group’s viewpoints when it decides whether to grant funds.
“It’s kind of contradictory,” Banfield said. “It’s going to be allocated within the viewpoint of the Multicultural Center.”
When the court released its decision during spring break, Justice Ashan Awan said the money can be allocated neutrally, and the MCC needs to rewrite its bylaws to reflect these changes.
Viewpoint neutrality became a concern last spring when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that incidental fees must be allocated in a neutral manner, but students can’t opt out of paying for groups with which they politically disagree.
But Banfield said the MCC fund should be the exception to the rule because the money is coming from a student vote rather than an established system such as the ASUO Student Senate or Programs Finance Committee.
“It comes down to the voice of the students,” he said.
In the Southworth v. Wisconsin case, the Supreme Court didn’t decide how ballot measures fit into the fee system, and the question still remains whether the Southworth case applies to the MCC’s allocation of funds.
A complete ASUO budget, including figures for the MCC and OSPIRG ballot measures, should have been sent to University President Dave Frohnmayer by Monday, but ASUO President Jay Breslow said Frohnmayer has extended the deadline to May 1.