The Oregon Student Public Interest Group, which has a history of fluctuating student funding and support, is applying for a $117,000 budget contract with the ASUO for inclusion in next year’s incidental fee funding.
ASUO Sens. Zachary Stark-MacMillan and Jeremy Blanchard spoke in favor of the group at last week’s Senate meeting, advocating that Senate address the issue of funding the group instead of sweeping it under the rug.
Stark-MacMillan said no one wants to touch the topic because an entire ASUO executive campaign supporting the defunding of OSPIRG — Oregon Action Team led by former ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz — won the elections in 2008. 
“It seems like if you’re for OSPIRG, it’s ASUO political suicide,” he said. “People don’t want to talk about it, they just want it to go away and die. It’s just such a heated issue and a drama in the ASUO that even the people that support OSPIRG don’t want to deal with it anymore.”
OSPIRG’s contract with the ASUO was discontinued last year after the Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee decided the group spent too much money off-campus without any tangible return for students.
Stark-MacMillan and Blanchard said there is an unspoken assumption among students that all of OSPIRG’s money goes to lobbyists and that students aren’t included in the process.
“They’re run by a student board, and that student board decides what issues they want to work on,” Blanchard said.
Stark-MacMillan added that what OSPIRG needs to do is to “manage the image better, because they are doing a lot, but it’s only important as long as people know what they’re doing.”
OSPIRG’s mission is to amplify student voice on topics including health care, environmental issues and consumer protection in legislation, according to its Web site.
OSPIRG Board Chair Charles Denson said the group is worthy of the request because it “gives students a chance to be civically engaged and work on larger political issues. It provides resources of a professional staff in which students have complete and total access to people who work to research and solve problems to issues that students care about.”
Blanchard and Stark-MacMillan both said that working with OSPIRG organizers during PowerShift West, an environmental student conference held two weeks ago, was an eye-opening experience. Stark-MacMillan said the event “would not have been as
successful without OSPIRG.”
Blanchard, whose knowledge of OSPIRG was previously limited to second-hand knowledge, is simply advocating that OSPIRG get fair and unbiased consideration when it comes to refunding it next year.
“Viewpoint neutral. That’s the idea; everyone always strives for that and that’s where our power comes from,” he said. “Not that anyone is intentionally not going into conversations viewpoint neutral, I just think that it’s definitely worth stating that this is a very contentious issue on campus and everyone needs to do their best to strive for this.”
Stark-MacMillan, however, is completely in support of funding of the group.
“I want people to support it. I want to work with senators on ACFC and OSPIRG so we can get somewhere that they can be partially funded, maybe on a path to be funded again,”
Stark-MacMillan said.
The outlook, however, isn’t promising.
“It seems like they are the only those two senators in support of putting OSPIRG back on campus,” said ASUO Sen. and ACFC Chair Alex McCafferty, so it’s not likely that OSPIRG will get any funding for the 2010-11 school year.
“A lot of it has to do with the current budget — it’s tight and isn’t conducive to adding a budget of that magnitude,” McCafferty said.
He added that the group has asked for the exact same budget as last year, seemingly with “no new information.”
“So far what I see is the same argument, the same proposal — the exact same budget request,” McCafferty said. “It didn’t fly last year and I don’t think it’s going to fly this year.”
[email protected]