I begin to think that the ASUO Senate might have reason to fear legal action from Johnson & Johnson for disparaging remarks about its product, the Band-Aid. At Wednesday night’s meeting, there was a lot of discussion of the prospect of using the windfall generated by the Oregon Business Energy Tax Credit to compensate for the huge increases required by the Athletic Department and Lane Transit District.
Those who thought it was a bad idea called the solution a “band-aid,” and then those who liked it said it was not a “band-aid.” Instead, Sen. Emma Kallaway said it was a “pair of floaty wings” that would stop the ASUO from drowning. I think the two metaphors are basically the same thing. You use a band-aid to protect your wound until it heals. Children use plastic buoyancy devices to keep them from drowning until they learn to swim. But the basic idea is that the carbon money is a quick fix, not a long term solution, and the disagreement was on whether that’s okay, whether senators believed they could rely on future generations to sort the problem out.
So in the end, the decision was to wait for more information on what the Senate was getting itself into. To that end, Senators postponed the deadline for the Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee’s budget so that the answers they got could be concrete. I’ll have more information on this for you in the coming days.