Student leaders need to focus on their constituents, transparency

ASUNM President Laz Cardenas sent a letter to the editor Jan. 20 encouraging “input and participation” in the Student Fee Review Board deliberations.

Students shell out almost $500 a year from their own pockets, Cardenas wrote, and place around $11 million in elected officials’ hands to distribute the money in students’ interests.
Cardenas’ column asked students to participate in the hearings and deliberations, and to help the SFRB make informed, responsible decisions about money earned and offered for the improvement of the UNM student experience. As one such student, I appreciated Cardenas’ column and invitation to his constituents.
However, I’m deeply disappointed in the hypocritical actions the ASUNM President took two days after 10,000 copies of his invitation were printed all over campus.

In a public building at a public university, during a public meeting about public funds, after requesting public input and public participation, Cardenas demanded a camera filming the SFRB deliberations be turned off, and he called authorities to enforce its removal.

First off, such a request is inappropriate, and I’m dumbfounded as to why UNMPD officers saw fit to ask the cameraman to leave (though he was eventually allowed to stay throughout the day’s deliberations). More important, however, Cardenas misapprehends his responsibilities as an elected official, the makeup of his constituency and the definition of a public meeting.

Cardenas is supposed to facilitate student understanding and involvement, particularly if decisions are being made about student money. Most students at UNM do not live on campus and aren’t in a fraternity or sorority. In fact, the majority of Cardenas’ constituents have at least one job outside of academics and were probably working during the SFRB deliberations on Saturday. They work Saturdays to afford school, pay bills and feed their kids, and they work even harder to pay the student fees that have, incidentally, more than doubled since 2003.

Further, no legal grounds exist to justify the removal of a member of the public from a public meeting, regardless of whether he or she is filming. When the vote took place about whether the meeting should be filmed, the three graduate students on the board voted for it, and each of the four undergraduates voted against it.

The footage from the deliberations would have been posted on the GPSA website. This would allow interested students unable to show up on Saturday to provide “input and participation” and do exactly as their elected president asked.

ASUNM senators even went so far as to accuse a Daily Lobo reporter of discreetly recording their conversation. Though she wasn’t recording, the reporter was fully in her right to document anything the senators said in earshot, and I’m taken aback by the lengths these senators went to dodge transparency.

Much is still up in the air regarding the student fee process, particularly now that ASUNM decided to circumvent the SFRB. However, what’s clear is that this process needs to involve students as much as possible, and elected graduates and undergraduates should work together to find a responsible use for our fees.

Cardenas sent an e-mail Sunday evening to the Daily Lobo justifying ASUNM’s proposed split from the SFRB for the hearings. In it, Cardenas cited “distracting interruptions” and “irrelevant attacks” against presenters and undergraduate board members.
This phrasing smacks of the same partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill, and both undergraduates and graduates are to blame for it.

GPSA President Lissa Knudsen alerted media shortly after Cardenas’ refusal to let the camera roll, capitalizing on a difference of opinion clearly recognized and negotiable in the days leading up to the deliberations.

Though the Daily Lobo staff and I are staunchly in favor of transparency among public officials, and by extension the recording of public meetings, we encourage student-governing bodies to avoid pontificating on behalf of individual political agendas.

I’d like to remind Cardenas about his opening remarks at the first ASUNM meeting as president this fall. He sat before the Senate to remind it of its task for the coming year.
“We’re representing 27,000 students,” Cardenas told the incoming senators. “So, just remember that.”
I hope the democratically elected public official remembers that, too.

Pat Lohmann
Editor-in-chief