Wednesday, September 29, 2004
zE SEA SON HASN'T BEGUN, BUT ICERS START OUT NO. I ... SPORTs, PAGE 8
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News 3 A New York Times
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Housing overhaul long
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One-hundredfourteen years of ediorilfreedom
www.michigandaily.com Ann Arbor, Michigan Vol. CXV, No. 1 2004 The Michigan Daily
BUDGET CUTS
* Custodians struggle
with new schedules
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Improving student living
The Michigan Student Assembly has announced it
will create a board to work with the University's
Student Legal Services on improving living condi-
tions off campus.
The assembly will send an e-mail out to presidents of
student organizations, notifying them about the board.
At a town hall meeting on Oct. 27, the board will
present to SLS some of its main issues of concern.
MSA launches
housing board
By Mary DeYoe
Daily Staff Reporter
The seemingly endless tussle between
tenants and Ann Arbor landlords, a
recurring woe for students seeking to
move off-campus, is about to start again
this year.
But the Michigan Student Assembly is
teaming up with the University's Student
Legal Services to create a place for stu-
dents to bring their concern and to final-
ly alleviate some of their problems.
MSA is organizing a new Housing
Advisory Board, a group which will
research general issues plaguing off-
campus living conditions, such as stu-
dents' lack of awareness about their
rights as tenants.
The group, which will hold its first
public meeting later next month, will
consist of six students and two Univer-
sity representatives.
At last night's assembly meeting,
Doug Lewis, director of Student Legal
Services, expressed his interest in work-
ing with MSA to finally resolve tensions
between tenants and landlords.
He noted that in the past broad issues
that affected many students were often
ignored because of the way that SLS was
set up to deal with them.
"At least 30 percent of what we do
involves disputes between tenants and
landlords, and many of the individual
problems overlap. However, it is hard to
combat these larger problems by working
only on a case by case basis," said Lewis,
who will be one of two University repre-
sentatives on the board.
Jesse Levine, MSA Student General
Counsel, who has been working closely
with Lewis on this topic, said, "The advi-
sory board will increases the communi-
cation between tenants and SLS."
The expired Student Housing Task-
force, which organized in January 2003
under the presidency of then-LSA senior
Sarah Boot, had similar goals of improv-
ing off-campus living.
The current assembly aims to revitalize
the task force's intentions and improve
upon them. "By selecting representatives
through a more selective application pro-
cess, we hope to have better qualified
spokespeople," Levine said.
The representatives will be selected by
Levine and members of MSA's Campus
Governance Committee. An e-mail will
be sent to the presidents of all student
groups on campus within the next few
days with information about the applica-
tion process. Eligible applicants are not,
however, limited to group leaders.
Levine encouraged anyone inter-
ested in the board to e-mail him at
jeslevne@umich.edu.
Once selected, the new advisory board
representatives will collect a list of the
See MSA, Page 7
Custodians Clayton Sweeny and Sarah Aldrich wheel containers of trash to the dumpster outside Mason Hall at about 6 a.m. yesterday.
Custodians, who used to work mainly at night, have begun working mostly from 4 a.m. to 12:30 p.m, due to budget cuts.
Staif ored to work sh fts a dawn
By Kristin Ostby
Daily Staff Reporter
Custodians at the University are under
pressure to complete their work with short-
ened, early-morning hours, causing exhaus-
tion and sleep-deprivation, some custodial
staff members said.
Budget cuts prompted Plant Building Services
to move up to 80 percent of its shifts to the early
morning, said Nathan Norman, Plant Building
Services director.
The moves are part of the University's budget
plan that it approved in July.
The change in shifts has saved Building Ser-
vices as much as $350,000, Norman said.
"One of the biggest complaints is that the
employees are being overworked and under-
"When they started
talking about changing the
shift to 4 (a.m), I jumped ...
for another department."
Jeremy Phillips
Custodian, West Quad Residence Hall
staffed," said Mike Edwards, president of Amer-
ican Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees Local 1583, the union that represents
the custodial staff at the University.
Edwards said although most shifts now last
from 4 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., custodians are expect-
ed to get all of their work done in the four hours
before classes begin at 8 a.m.
"That leaves a lot of work (in that short period
of time)," he said.
Norman said there is still enough time to fin-
ish cleaning. "We don't try to get all of our work
done before (students) come in, in the morning,"
he said. "We have this very well figured out."
Prior to budget changes, most shifts for the
367-member custodial staff were from 4 p.m. to
12:30 a.m., or from 11 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., Nor-
man said.
Although Building Services saves money,
some custodians say they are suffering from
the cuts. One is Jeremy Phillips, a former custo-
dian at Building Services, whose custodial staff
See CUTS, Page 7
LECTLONS<04'
South Asians aim
to boost turnout
By Victoria Edwards
and Carissa Miller
Daily Staff Reporters
Sierra Club chief blasts Bush
By Alex Garivaltis
For The Daily
Speaking yesterday at the School of Natural
Resources and the Environment, Sierra Club
Executive Director Carl Pope promoted the tenet
of his new book - that the Bush administration is
"recklessly destroying a century of environmen-
tal progress."
His message, though delivered in a state that
is closely divided between President Bush and
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry for
the presidency, found favor with the vast majority
of the more than 80 audience members, who were
mostly students and area residents.
Scott Foley, a member of the University College
Republicans executive board, said, "I wouldn't
take anything from the Sier-
ra Club as fact." The Sierra
Club is known to have a lib-'
eral bent, overwhelmingly
endorsing Democratic can-
didates such as Bill Clinton
in 1992, Al Gore in 2000
and Kerry this year.
Pope spoke of the EPA's
progress from 1980 to 2000
in cleaning up hazardous
waste sites. "At the rate of
environmental cleanup that Pope
still existed in 2000, all of
the major U.S. toxic waste dumps would have
been cleaned up by 2020," he said. The Bush
administration's watch, he said, has seen the first
hazardous waste increase in 20 years.
Pope said Bush has drastically reversed what
was, until his administration, an ongoing national
record of improving drinking water cleanliness.
He said the reversal is one of "hundreds" of the
Bush administration's environmental failures.
Nostalgically, Pope discussed the acreage of
national landmarks, which had been increasing
through the year 2000. He said in the three years
of the Bush presidency, 145 million acres of land
were stripped of their protective status, breaking
a tradition that began with Theodore Roosevelt
and was kept alive by all subsequent U.S. presi-
dents, including Bill Clinton.
"Why did the Bush administration try so hard
to reverse all of that progress?" he said. He dis-
See POPE, Page 7
Amid tables of chicken wings, pakora and
potato salad, students questioned and educated
each other in an attempt to raise the voter reg-
istration rate among South Asian students, who
community leaders say participate in elections in
lower numbers than any other minority group.
LSA junior Ramya Raghavan, chair of the
College Democrats, was one of several student
political leaders who participated in an Indian
Ameican Student Association mixer last night in
the Michigan Union to raise awareness among
South Asians about the importance of this year's
election.
She said voter registration is important
because South Asians have traditionally been
overlooked by politicians.
"(We've been ignored) because South Asian
students seem somewhat apathetic to issues. I've
been talking to people here and they are particu-
larly affected by education, immigration and
civil liberties," Raghavan said.
She added that she feels the votes of South
Asians have been taken for granted by certain
political parties, especially since in the past
many South Asians could not vote becaue they
lacked citizenship.
The event brought together representatives
from student political groups such as the College
Democrats, College Republicans, as well as rep-
resentatives from LSA Student Government.
Organizers of the event stressed the impor-
tance that first-time voters register in Ann Arbor
instead of trying to obtain an absentee ballot,
which students cannot send in when voting for
the first time under many state laws.
The roughly 100 students, a majority of whom
were South Asian, were then urged to question
the student political leaders for the rest of the
evening.
Jaya Soni, a member of South Asian Ameri-
can Voting Youth, echoed Raghavan by saying
that this generation of South Asians is influential
because in many cases it is the first generation
with the right to vote. SAAVY is an organiza-
tion that concentrates on registering South Asian
American youths to vote.
"A lot of our parents couldn't vote. We're
See ELECTIONS, Page 7
Oil prices hit record high
k T)
LONDON (AP) - Crude oil topped the
psychological milestone of $50 per barrel yes-
terday for the first time, and a Saudi Arabian
oil official said the world's largest petroleum
exporter would raise its production capacity
by nearly 5 percent in a bid to calm prices.
Analysts said instability in the Middle East,
political unrest in Nigeria, Africa's top oil
exporter, and damage to U.S. production from
est oil exporter will go into effect within
weeks, using new fields where production has
just begun, Oil Minister Ali Naimi said.
"The fields of Abu Safa and al-Qatif, which
have just started production, will be used to
increase the kingdom's production capacity
in the coming few weeks to 11 million barrels
per day," the minister said in a statement.
"In light of the recent developments in
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