Increasing UMSU fees only one-third a success

Students vote no in two of three referendum questions

JENELLE PETRINCHUK STAFF

Students passed only one of three referendum questions presented to them in this year’s UMSU general election. Of the three student groups — all requesting a small amount of money to go towards their causes — only UMREG’s fee increase of 50 cents a year was voted in.

Winning by 1100 votes to 740 “no” votes (not including the 127 spoiled ballots), the University of Manitoba Recycling and Environmental Group was asking for the least amount of money — icePIRG and Engineers Without Borders were asking for $2 and 70 cents respectively — and is the only group that already had an existing levy of $2 per regular session.

“We weren’t really sure what to expect,” said Anders Annell, UMREG representative, who also added they were mostly concerned about meeting the required five per cent of voter turnout.

UMREG plans on using the new money to buy more recycling bins for campus, hire more staff and promote educating people on the subject of recycling.

Laura Robson, a representative for Engineers Without Borders, thinks the main reason their referendum didn’t go through is due to the lack of knowledge on what their groups mandate is, which is to provide help and support for human development projects world-wide.

“There was still probably a lack of understanding about what our organization was and did,” said Robson, adding that because of the group’s name, people may have assumed it was only for engineering students, and therefore didn’t want to help if they were part of a different faculty.

Robson pointed out that she found it weird that they needed 1,000 signatures from students to see if they could even run the question, yet only 836 students voted for the group.

“You get to kind of thinking, well, what happened?” said Robson.

Annell speculated the reason UMREG won while the other two groups didn’t was because they are more known on campus: “UMREG has already established funding and is somewhat . . . we have some presence on campus, we have bins all over the place,” he said, “Recycling is kind of a non-issue. Not many people can fight against its cause.”
Robson concluded, “It’s not our student group that is hurting because we didn’t get the money, it’s going to be people overseas who now many not get their new well or something like that.”