Zachary Antoyan
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Zachary Antoyan is a political science senior and Mustang News liberal columnist. These views do not necessarily reflect the opinion or editorial coverage of Mustang News.
Chances are your opinion as a student at Cal Poly is less than represented on the city level in San Luis Obispo. You, the Cal Poly student body, who help drive a small city economy and impact the community on numerous philanthropic and service-based levels, have little institutional connections to the San Luis Obispo city government. And though your time in the area may be limited to the four, five or six years of schooling if you are (un?)lucky enough, your say in affairs regarding San Luis Obispo matters. If only there was a way for a student or recent graduate with close ties to the school to act as that institutional connection.
Oh wait, there are two San Luis Obispo City Council seats waiting to be filled in the November elections. So what if a student or recent graduate were to run? Lots of good things, believe me. Not only this, but a well-constructed campaign could have a damn good chance of winning a seat.
In an April 15 City Council meeting, the open community forum yielded the floor to former Council Member Doty Williams and former Mayor Ken Schwartz. With regards to the relationship between the school and the city over the proposed housing project, Schwartz presented a petition that urged both Cal Poly and the San Luis Obispo City Council to “work in partnership in consideration of the timing and prospective locations for all future student housing.” Williams further established that “we believe (the group of former City Council members and mayors) reflect the opinion of your constituents — a majority of them, as a matter of fact — that of being allowed to live in one’s neighborhood, in harmony with one’s neighbors.”
This is a mere glimpse of a major issue between Cal Poly and the city of San Luis Obispo, and the proposed housing project Cal Poly is attempting to undertake serves as a focal point for such a glaring issue: the breakdown in communication between the two. This is exactly where a student in a City Council seat would come in, by bridging this gap, closing the rift in communication, representation and perspective.
I couldn’t agree more that we need to have the availability to live in harmony in our neighborhoods. But I struggle to find this possible without the legitimized input of the student demographic. And while, yes, some students may be less concerned about the well-being of the community at large or the historical value of the neighborhood, I would argue that a lack of representation for this demographic does a disservice to the city. Just as we have our bad apples, so does the long-time resident constituency who associate students with “beer bongs and rap music,” to quote a concerned resident from a recent open forum for the proposed housing project.
So where does that leave the student who should run? It leaves them in the perfect spot to take the student vote (if mobilized, which is a whole demon in and of itself), the vote of citizens concerned with possibility of breakdowns in future relations between the city and school and the vote of local alumni — each of which can carry a massive amount of clout in the area. The impact of the school and students in the city cannot be neglected, as it brings in more than $469 million annually for the region, and perhaps more importantly, $29 million annually in local taxes.
We can take, for instance, Measure Y, a 1/2 cent tax that goes toward infrastructure improvements and is currently blocking half of the street I live on. It generates $5.7 million a year in revenue, and is up for a vote once again after having been passed the last time.
Students, major contributors to that tax revenue, have virtually no say in how those revenues are redistributed throughout the communities. It is but another area that the student demographic is underrepresented.
With such an impact on the community, we should require more of a say in the decisions of the city, not only for the sake of ourselves, but also in order to foster better communications between students, the school, the community and the city government.
This is Zachary Antoyan, thinking maybe I should run … probably not … but maybe … hmm.