By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: April 2, 2014
(Image: Cascade archives)
Earlier this semester, The Cascade held a referendum. We asked UFV students to approve a fee increase of $1.50, which would bring The Cascade’s fee to a total of $6 per semester. We also asked to tie it to inflation, which would allow the fee to increase up to 2.5 per cent every year with the cost of operating.
This referendum failed by eight votes.
But considering only 289 people voted, the referendum kind of failed by a lot more than eight votes. Over 9000 students were eligible to vote; only three per cent of them actually did. Clearly, we did something wrong.
We’re back this month with another referendum, asking for the same increase. The truth is, we’re between a rock and a hard place. We’re reaching the point of semester where students are suffering from voter’s fatigue. But many of the current staff and board members, who have been working towards a referendum for the last year, will be graduating or leaving at the end of the summer.
So this second referendum is born out of two things: the fact that we’ve put in so much work already, and the fact that so few people voted in the first poll..
So this week we’re going pedal to the metal to rally up awareness and more voters. SUS had around 315 people vote in its most recent election, and CIVL had around 550 in its fee increase referendum in January. There is no policy in place that sets a bar for how many people must vote for a referendum to count, but our goal is to boost our numbers as much as we can. Whether it passes or fails, we want it to be by more than eight votes.
I wouldn’t have been comfortable accepting the last referendum’s results — because so few people voted, because the margin between YES and NO was so slim, and because I know we could have tried even harder to get as many votes as possible.
At the end of the day, I strongly believe in what The Cascade does and what it stands for. We serve as a training ground for the next generation of journalists, we explore UFV-related stories in detail when local newspapers can’t spare the manpower, and over the past year we’ve detailed SUS goings-on more thoroughly than ever before.
On a more sentimental level, we bring the school back to the students. The majority of our readers tell us they pick the paper up when they’re waiting for the bus or for class, or when they’re procrastinating. In those in-between moments, we connect the student body together — reminding them of the research our professors do, reminding them of the clubs and events that bring life to the campus, and reminding them why they pay fees every semester and what those fees are for.
It’s the end of semester, and you probably have a lot on your mind. But if you have a minute and a dollar-and-a-half to spare, I hope you think of The Cascade this coming week. Our referendum runs from April 7 to 9 through myUFV.
