John Hult

Feist & Arne would foster student input

A desire to get to know and help people coupled with a desire to make it easier to approach student leaders motivated Ryan Feist and his running mate Stephanie Arne to run for president and vice president of the SA.

“Every student that goes to SDSU is part of the SA,” Feist said.

Arne also pointed out that SDSU’s student government ought to be easily accessible to all students, regardless of their age.

“Being in the dorms last year, I remember a lot of things being really annoying,” Arne said. “I might not have had enough guts to come to the president as a wee freshman and say things like ‘We don’t have a quarter machine in the laundry room.'”

One major goal the pair would seek to achieve over the course of a possible presidential term would be to turn the student union into a more modern information center for students.Feist, a junior agronomy major and Arne, a sophomore human development major, were the second pair of candidates to throw their hat in the ring for the SA presidential elections, which take place this Wednesday and Friday at polls on campus and on the Internet.

The candidates also said that they would endorse an SA plan to combine all of the “S” parking lots into one classification to ease the parking problems next year’s larger enrollment are likely to increase.

“That means people from Bailey can come over to Young, and if the parking lot by Young is filled up, they can go over to the one that Pierson Hall usually parks in,” Arne said. Arne also said that she and Feist might support the combining of SC and FE lots, because many instructors only need their parking spots for a few hours each day.

“That could create a lot more space for off-campus students,”Arne said.

Feist, who currently serves as finance chair for the SA, said that the student fees the SA allocates are currently rationed fairly and that he and Arne would work to insure that the fair distribution practices would continue.

He would like to see more education for students and faculty about Division I, however. Both he and Arne support the move because of the increase in resources the change in athletic classification would bring to SDSU.

“The majority of people who know more about it are for it,” Feist said.

“It’s not going to cost the students any money,” Arne said. “It’s going to bring in more students, which is going to bring in more student fees, which is going to give us more resources and more things to do.”

Feist, who was asked by both his opponent Eric Erickson and former candidate Jeff Nolz to run for vice president last year, said that he chose Arne as his running mate after being approached by several possible vice presidential candidates because of her qualifications as an SA senator and hall government.

“I looked everyone over and I decided I was going to ask Stephanie,” he said. “She’s a very smart, intelligent young lady-very devoted, very passionate about what she does-and she has a lot of care and a lot of concern.”

Erickson & Larson want to make SA open

SA presidential candidate Eric Erickson and his running mate Justin Larson say that their election to the student body’s most influential positions would insure an open door and open ear for student concerns.

“We like to get out there and talk to the students a lot,” Larson said. “It’s not only when we’re doing senate hours- we’re always talking to people to find out what they want changed.”

Erickson, a junior political science major, and Larson, a junior mechanical engineering major, plan to hold biweekly or monthly round table discussions over the lunch hour to listen to student concerns if elected.

Erickson said that although student fee allocation is an important function of the SA, the other half of its duty- providing a voice for student concerns by sitting on various committees- can have just as great an impact on students.

“A lot of the time that can have a lot bigger implications on campus, in deciding if we’re going to go Division I or if we’re going to expand the Union, speaking with the Board of Regents, speaking with the legislature, speaking with the city council on taxes they want to impose,” Erickson said. If elected, the pair said, they plan to rewrite the SA’s budgeting philosophy for student fees and work to educate students about Division I,which they both support, by providing input to the Athletic Department on areas of student concern. The Athletic Department could use the input to decide what information to include in mass mailings about Division I. They also both indicated that they might endorse a current SA proposal for a shuttle bus system to help alleviate some problems with parking.

“We’d like to push that up a little bit,” Erickson said. “What we’re [the SA] kind of looking at is a shuttle system that would stop by the Greek houses, by the Residence Halls and by the parking lots so if you come in late, you don’t have to look for 20 minutes.”

Some other ideas they endorse include creating a UPD oversight committee and working with the city council to bring higher paying jobs for students to Brookings. Erickson, an at-large SA senator who currently serves as administrative assistant, said that such goals would require the cooperation of the state Legislature, city council, the Board of Regents and groups throughout the SDSU Administration.

Larson explained that Erickson’s current relationships with members of those groups would make the goals easier to achieve.

“Erickson knows all the senators, he knows state senators, he knows city people, he knows deans and he knows the president,” he said.

Erickson said that he chose Larson as a running mate because of his experience. Larson was president of the Residence Hall Association last year.

“He knows a lot about what’s going on in [the Residence Halls], and that’s a big part of campus,” Erickson said. “He’s got a lot of connections on campus and I know a lot of upperclassmen.”

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