Ohio
PIRG Seeks to Up Fee, Improve Program
By Blake
Wilder
Ohio
PIRG is campaigning once again to renew their funding, but this
year they’re pushing a referendum signed by two-thirds of
the student body to raise the student fee from six dollars per student
each semester to eight dollars.
Unlike other student organizations, Ohio PIRG gets funding from
the alternative student group funding procedure which requires them
to get support from the majority of the student body every two years.
“What this money is going to do is it’s going to allow
us to have more staff working with the students,” Ohio PIRG
Board Chair Senior Winston Vaughan said. “Raising the fee
will allow Oberlin students to make a difference on the issues they
care about the most. The bottom line is we are raising the fee so
we can do better work on our campaigns.”
Vaughan urged students to support the group, pointing out that Ohio
PIRG has its sights on statewide and even national objectives for
environmental policy.
“In a lot of ways Ohio PIRG has a very different mission than
other student groups,” Vaughan said. “In a lot of ways
we are a statewide public interest group. We have a chapter on campus
but it is our job to be the advocate for the public statewide.”
The national campaign, “America’s Environment at Risk,”
is being undertaken by student PIRG groups across the country. “We’re
trying to stop the Bush administration from weakening our environmental
laws,” Vaughan said.
The campaign, for now, focuses around three basic initiatives: The
Clean Air Act, the “Roadless Plan” and “Superfund.”
The Bush administration, Vaughan said, is trying to weaken the Clean
Air Act by eliminating the new source review, a major provision
of the Clean Air Act. This would allow some of the worst power plants
to pollute more, according to Vaughan.
The “Roadless Plan,” put in place in the last days of
the Clinton administration, is designed to protect 58.5 million
acres of roadless areas and national forests. The original legislation
came amidst a flood of 2.2 million postcards and letters to the
government — the largest number of public comments ever delivered
to the government on a single issue. PIRG played a part in the campaign.
“A lot of those came from Oberlin,” Vaughan said.
Another piece of Clintonian legislation, Superfund, is the common
term for a law that makes polluting companies pay for cleaning up
public waste sites. So far, Bush has failed to renew the program.
“The whole idea behind Superfund is it works as a deterrent,”
Vaughan said. “If you know you’re going to have to pay
for it, you’re going to be a whole lot less likely to make
a mess in the first place.”
On the local front, Ohio PIRG has three main goals: to defend Lake
Erie from oil and gas drilling, to make higher education in Ohio
more affordable and to fight hunger and homelessness.
A
laundry list of other student groups have already endorsed the reaffirmation
drive, including the Sierra Student Coalition, Climate Justice,
Newman Catholic, Socialist Alternative, OC Democrats, Global AIDS
and Animal Rights.
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