It is vital to address the misconceptions surrounding last year’s OSPIRG ballot measure campaign and the ASUO contracted service process. Last year’s OSPIRG ballot measure resulted in 51 percent of ASUO voters supporting OSPIRG and 49 percent of voters not supporting the measure.
It is a common misconstruction that this was a vote for OSPIRG to gain funding and an election that OSPIRG “won.” Rather, this process is not a binding vote and is instead used for the ASUO to assess the level of student support for a program or contract. After a highly visible and divisive $3,680 campaign run by OSPIRG, the results demonstrate that students are evenly, and deeply, divided about their fees supporting a new OSPIRG contract. It is disingenuous to claim that because OSPIRG received 51 percent of the vote, students support OSPIRG. A more accurate statement is that students have mixed feelings about supporting OSPIRG.
Demonstrating a strong level of student support is essential to the decision about contracted services, which OSPIRG is attempting to become. The current ASUO contracts such as athletic tickets, the Oregon Daily Emerald and Sexual Assault Support Services have overwhelming support from the vast majority of students.
Using the incidental fee to fund the current contracts has never been the source of much controversy; there may have been concerns about the amount of money these contracts have received, but there has been little debate about the validity of the existence of these contracts. It would be a disservice to the contracting process to add a new contract that students are extremely divided in support of when the ASUO is struggling to maintain the current service level of the widely supported contracts currently receiving incidental fee money.
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