Kyla Coy – Vice President
Age: 20
Major: Political Science and Religious Studies
Hometown: Eugene
Year: Junior
Adam Walsh – President
Age: 21
Major: History and Political Science
Hometown: Eugene
Year: Junior
Emerald: What qualifies you for the position?
Walsh: I ran for City Council last May, I’m a presynch committee person for the Democratic Party of Lane County, I’m on the board for the West University Neighbors.
Coy: I’ve worked on several campaigns since I was like 16, like presidential, senate, stuff like that. I’ve done political internships like the Bus Project focusing on local political issues like city politics, city council and other stuff.

Emerald: So you know a lot about city politics here in Eugene?
Coy: Yeah.
Emerald: Why do you want the job?
Coy: I think for me I want to make it easier to be a student, like right now incidental fees are skyrocketing and people are finding it harder to go to school and pay the fees and everything.
Walsh: We feel like we have a platform that really is open to all students, that it doesn’t offer to little but at the same time it doesn’t offer too much. One of the reasons that we wanted to run was because with the platform that we have, or with platforms in the past really they haven’t been — they either haven’t been good enough for students they haven’t given students a reason to vote or they haven’t promised enough or they’ve just promised too much and there aren’t tangible things. Everything on our platform in tangible.
Coy: Our ideas can really affect students, like actually affect them through internships and opportunities.
Walsh: The ideas that we have aren’t going to be just things for the short-term, they are things that are going to affect students for years to come.
Emerald: Could you kind of describe those? Like if you could sum up your platform summary in just one sentence or a couple words.
Walsh: It’ll be more than that. What we want to do is — the first thing we want to do is create a better connection to the community. Growing up in Eugene, Kyla and I both have experienced life in the city and life on campus and there’s definitely is a difference between the two, so we want to bridge the gap between the two spheres of Eugene, the city and the University. The first way we want to do that is by creating a liaison position between the ASUO and city government to our city council, the mayor and county commissioners. That way when something like housing standards comes up there’s not just a mad dash to the city council asking them to stop everything and start working on housing standards; there’d be a bridge and a link already created so that the student’s voice is always been heard when an issue comes up. Also in that way we would create more accountability for our city officials because there’s no way that, having that link established, that they would be able to say that they didn’t know. They would be more accountable to students and that way student issues would be more publicized. We also want to create a partnership between the chamber of commerce — we’ve talked to the president of the chamber of commerce and he’s interested for sure — between the various schools on campus, so the University through the career center to local business in Eugene area. The way we want to do that is by advertising the Career Center not only as a one-stop shop for students who are looking for internships, jobs and volunteer opportunities but also to businesses so that businesses have a place to go when they have job openings or internship possibilities for students. The way we would do that is through the Chamber’s magazine that they publish to all local businesses. We’d give the contact information as well as a vigorous campaigning through the Chamber of Commerce to really promote this as a solid and viable option for businesses. The second thing we want to do is restructure, or is to slow the growth of the incidental fee. It went up seven percent from last year. Really we would like to see the incidental fee not grow much outside of the mandated increases that need to happen for things like minimum wage or when gas goes up APS needs a larger budget but outside of that we would like to kind of restrict the growth of the incidental fee and create a system of matching funds for groups that want increases to their budgets so for instance if a group wants a $1,000 increase to their budget then if they can show they fundraised $500 they’d be eligible for matching funds of $500. Not that a group couldn’t get an increase anyway but it would be a way of incenting groups to start fundraising more of their own budgets while at the same time it would encourage fiscal responsibility in groups because they’re fundraising more of their own money as well as being less of a burden on students while At the same time they’re either getting better service or maintaining the current service that they have right now. And then lastly, roll-over meal points in the dorms. We feel like we can be a voice for students in the dorms as well. Most of them are freshmen and they don’t have any actual representation in student government because they haven’t been here for an election, so the one point that we have for them now is roll-over meal points. As it is they lose the meal points that they don’t spend by the end of the week. They pay for them; they should get to keep them.
Emerald: And in light of the ASUO retreat to Sunriver what do you think is the best way to ensure proper accountability from student leaders next year?
Walsh: The best way would be to have a highly visible executive and highly visible student government, something that we’ve lacked in the past not so much under Adam Petkun but under Maddy (Melton) and Eddy (Morales) the visibility of the executive was almost nonexistent. So what we need is not only strong leadership but visible leadership. For instance, if something like that were to happen what we need is not to have the Daily Emerald reporters contacting the executive for a statement but the executive contacting the Emerald for a statement. We need the executive contacting the Emerald to write opinion editorials and to let students know what’s going on. There’s no structure we can put in place to ensure that student government officials are going to do the right thing all the time but what we can have is high visibility and make the promise that when something does go wrong that we’ll right that wrong. For instance, for what happened with Sunriver what we would have liked to have seen for the $3,200 to be paid back, or 34 or whatever it was, to be paid back to the student funds even though some learning may have obviously taken place. The right thing to do would have just to have returned the money as a show of a good faith to the student body.
Emerald: If you were elected how would you organize your staff to reflect your priorities?
Walsh: What’d we’d want is a staff that reflects all the, that reflects the diverse opinions on campus. What we would want not only kids that have grown up in Eugene but kids who have grown up in other countries as well as across the country so that we would be diverse not only ethnically but as far as just life experience goes.
Coy: And ideologically because lots of people feel threatened by the liberal-ness of the campus and we need to (welcome) those people in and take on their opinions as well.
Emerald: We’ve got about two minutes if you want to talk about other issues on your platform or anything else you feel is pertinent for student
s to know.
Walsh: We would like to revise the way the budget process works so it’s less (unintelligible). It seems that year after year the PFC will go through the budgeting process, they’ll get 90 percent of the way through and they’ll realize that they’ve
allocated too much money to the groups that have already gone, leaving the last 10 percent of groups (to be treated unfairly).
Audio recording ends
20 second pause in interview
Second recording begins
Walsh: What we want to do is instead of finalizing budgets early just make a tentative budget that way once we get 90 percent of the way through the process and you realize too much money has been allocated and the groups that are left aren’t going to be treated fairly you can go back through across the budget and make a universal quarter percent cut or half percent cut to the 90 percent of the groups that have already been allocated to then freeing up that money and then redistributing that money proportionately and fairly among the groups that are left. So you really only have to make as much of a cut as is necessary to adequately fund the groups. The only real good thing, the only good thing that came out of the PFC lately or in this new stipend model is that there’s some kind of consistency in the stipends. What we’d like to see is not necessarily the same system but a consistency in the stipends as well as fair allocation of resources and really just a fair platform in general. That’s why we want freshman to have roll-over points because they pay for what they get. It should be fairness across the board.
— Meghann Cuniff