Campus creek
When the SGA decided Nov. 5 to allocate funds from its budget to restoring Campus Creek, it argued that doing so demonstrated student support for the project.
So, by a vote of 21-1, the Student Government Association wrote off $5,000 of its $50,000 in available legislative funds for the 2014-15 academic year.
Whether the majority of students support the initiative is largely moot, as the SGA has proved in the past that there is generally little dissent within its voting body.
And on a campus as politically disengaged as this one — less than 4 percent of the student body voted in the last SGA general election — it seems likely that most students aren’t even aware of creek restoration efforts.
The creek’s advocates say excessive rainwater runoff kills surrounding vegetation, erodes the creek’s banks and brings in pollutants that eventually reach the Chesapeake Bay, and they’re not wrong.
Back in May, this state’s natural resources department awarded the university a $1.5 million grant to support the restoration project, funding the university will lose if it isn’t spent by the end of June 2016.
To secure the grant, the university must submit a restoration plan drawn up by an external contractor at an estimated cost of $495,000.
That’s a whopping figure,but the university’s facilities planning department has received $50,000 from the University Sustainability Council and another $25,000 from this university’s Friends of the Golf Course.
The remaining $415,000, which would come from two other campus sources, has been recommended for project use, according to facilities planning officials.
The Facilities Council has yet to approve the restoration project and its supporting funds, and its members will vote on the initiative at its Dec. 4 meeting, but Facilities Planning Director Brenda Testa said the department hopes to enlist a contractor within the next few weeks.
It would appear, then, that the university intends to push forward with the project, and Facilities Planning has had remarkable success in garnering capital to support it.
With $490,000 either approved or recommended for use from university departments and programs as well as outside philanthropic groups, though, it’s unclear why the SGA felt it necessary to sign away such a significant portion of its budget.
Surely, that $5,000 could’ve been acquired from another department or the sustainability fund. The SGA Student Sustainability Committee already has demonstrated its support for a range of green initiatives that have been far less expensive and affected students more visibly.
The SGA’s interests are narrow — and that’s not a knock on the governing body. When few students participate in the university’s elections or pay attention to agendas, there’s not as much opportunity for engagement. The causes championed by representatives — not necessarily those the electorate favors — are going to be the ones the SGA focuses on.
All the same, spending 10 percent of the organization’s legislative budget on 1 percent of a project funded primarily by other university resources won’t have the same perceived impact as, say, spending $5,000 to increase the number of bike racks on the campus.
The SGA’s commitment to sustainability is all well and good — it’s no small factor in the university’s ranking among the greenest in the country. But given other funding sources’ vested interest in the creek restoration, the decision to throw so much support — and money — behind the project comes off as a bit hasty.
