EDITORIAL – The Pitt News endorses Joe Leinbach for SGB president

Editor’s Note: The Pitt News Editorial Board endorses a single Student Government Board… Editor’s Note: The Pitt News Editorial Board endorses a single Student Government Board presidential candidate and not the slate with which he is affiliated.

Last Friday, members of The Pitt News editorial board sat down with the four SGB presidential candidates and interviewed them about their bids for office. We assessed the major points of each candidates’ platform and the following is a comprehensive overview of the 2007 SGB presidential candidates: Shady Henien, Elan Strait, Will Powers and Joe Leinbach.

Shady Henien

Henien served on SGB for one year and seeks the presidency with the belief that his high level of involvement in campus organizations will help him “unify” campus. We disagree. Although an ideal presidential candidate is plugged into our campus, Henien has too many connections with campus organizations whose politics could influence his decisions when it comes to allocating money.

Henien’s other projects include Mobile Campus, a presidential council and printing ads on the sheet that is included in every document a student prints.

Mobile Campus is a text-messaging service that Henien is working to bring to Pitt. Students who signed up for the service would receive updates from their professors about class and ads with text message coupons of “substantial value.” Students would receive a minimum of two text advertisements a day from businesses and regular text messaging charges would apply to this service. What we’re wondering is if our professors are even going to buy into this program. The proposal just seems like a big waste of money — money that could be better spent elsewhere, and we’re pretty satisfied with the methods of communication already in place, such as e-mail and Courseweb. Don’t we get enough spam in our inboxes already?

Furthermore, not every student on campus has a text-messaging plan, and some plans actually charge customers for incoming text messages, meaning students could be paying for all of those coupons and messages.

A presidential council comprised of student leaders isn’t a bad idea. Logistically, it might be messy but we applaud Henien’s effort to bring the campus together.

Henien also would like to utilize the colored coversheets that accompany campus computer lab printouts to sell ads and advertise campus events. Sounds like a good idea, but who would oversee such an ambitious project? Pitt or SGB would have to create an entire department to deal with the high volume of requests that the proposal would create. In the end, if this project makes money for students — money that would go right back into the student activities pot — and does a good job of disseminating information to students, we can’t dismiss the idea. We just don’t want to see an entire page of ads for businesses when we pick up our papers.

Elan Strait

Strait is the only presidential candidate who has not served on the Student Government Board itself, however, he was a member of the allocations committee. He is the president of Hillel, and his campaign proposals are overly ambitious at best.

Strait would like to create a student representative body that would have members from every residence floor, every Oakland street and every city neighborhood in which students live. While we applaud the motivation behind his grand idea — getting representative student input — it’s just not feasible. This body would have hundreds of members and it would take an immense amount of coordination — too much to be useful.

Closing Bigelow Boulevard is another of the bold ideas pitched by Strait to the student body. While we’d love to make this a reality, it’s fundamentally flawed with regard to the infrastructure of Oakland. In order to make this a reality, the city would have to execute a major overhaul of Oakland streets — lanes would have to be added or reversed and streets would have to be widened. This project is far beyond the scope of a 1-year term and it would just be a hot mess.

Strait has also proposed bringing a grocery store into Oakland, but unless he has some innovative ideas about how to attach a Giant Eagle to the top of the Cathedral, the chances of bringing a major grocery store into Oakland are pretty slim, and again, beyond the scope of a 1-year SBG presidential term.

Although his term as Hillel president ends in December, his affiliation with the group causes us to second guess his ability to be impartial when it comes to making tough funding decisions.

We can’t help but compare Strait to that kid in high school who promised to pump chocolate milk through the water fountains and install vending machines if elected to student council. We’re still waiting for the chocolate milk.

Will Powers

Although Powers is interested in tweaking the allocations process, his main concern is representation and diversity, a point that this editorial board is delighted to see come to the forefront. Powers wants to work to make sure that groups promoting intolerance can’t receive funding from Student Organization Resource Center (SORC). Following the While Action Society debate, Powers criticized the current SGB president for not dealing with race issues in a more proactive manner.

Powers is also pursuing a plan to alleviate printing overload in campus computing labs because of times during the day when the labs on campus become completely jammed. He’s working with Computing Services and Systems Development to come up with a way for students to print from off-campus locations to help alleviate some of the jams that occur during the day. Although we were skeptical at first about this idea, it seems pretty sound. Powers indicated that there would be a separate station for off-campus print-out pick-up. Since people could print anytime from home, the computer-lab rush from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. — when most students are on campus —would be lightened.

With regard to allocations, Powers would like to increase the amount of money put aside each semester for groups that don’t submit budgets. This would help to protect smaller groups and start-up groups who don’t have the organization of larger groups.

Powers also campaigned hard for significant food to be available in Lothrop Hall. While Lothrop residents won’t be dining on steak anytime soon, they can thank Powers for some additional, extra special vending machines. Powers also promised to pursue a drainage system for the Cathedral lawn so that club sports would be able to practice more. Powers sparked an inquiry that concluded it was too costly to pursue installing drainage. Consequently, sections of the lawn are roped off when it rains, effectively reducing field time for club teams.

And despite testimony to the contrary, Powers remains active on party Web site ptmarion.com, a site he co-created and still owns. In Friday’s interviews, Powers said, “I’ve since resigned from point marion I no longer have any ties, any influence over its senate whatsoever, it’s separated from me completely.”

That’s funny, because Sunday night Powers posted on ptmarion.com and sent members an e-mail encouraging them to vote for him and members of his slate. He signed the e-mail “Student Government Board Member, ex-leader/co-creator [of ptmarion.com].” That doesn’t sound like someone who’s severed all ties, now does it? Even though it may not be a direct violation of the elections code, Powers is contradicting himself and undermining the intelligence of the student body.

Joe Leinbach

Leinbach is the most qualified candidate with respect to his involvement in SGB. Leinbach served on the allocations committee before seeking a spot on the board last year. His thorough knowledge of the allocations process led to his appointment as business manager and liaison to the allocations committee on the board and he is committed to educating both the board and student organizations about fiscal responsibility if elected. Allocations requests are perhaps the most hotly debated issue that SGB deals with and Leinbach believes that student groups would be more satisfied if they better understood the process and submitted budgets.

If elected, Leinbach hopes to utilize common areas to meet with students. He plans to have board members hold their office hours in the lobby of Towers and other open, accessible areas. He would also like to have a student member on the University’s Board of Trustees, a position that many other universities have. During his time on board, Leinbach worked to bring the University a legal file-sharing program and he continued his work with the reservations taskforce, a team assembled to help optimize the facility reservations system for groups.

Voting for Leinbach is a safe bet. He’s not proposing anything outlandish and unreasonable and when we envision the person who would best represent the student body both in experience and character, the Editorial Board of The Pitt News endorses Joe Leinbach for SGB President in tomorrow’s election.