To answer the above question, probably just where it is right now.
Moving Campus Recycling off of the incidental fee was one of Alex McCafferty’s less-cited but, I think, more interesting campaign planks. It’s of a strain of old-timey ASUO conservatism that’s no longer so pronounced. That is, it’s seemingly rooted in the idea, articulated to me most recently by ASUO Sen. Demic Tipitino when I interviewed him on the radio, that students, mercurial and distracted as they are, are a worse fit for allocating the ASUO’s $12 million budget than the University administration.
You can read McCafferty’s opinion on Campus Recycling in his interview with the Oregon Commentator’s page or in a letter he wrote to the Emerald in March.
With McCafferty’s Reality Check campaign taking a majority on the DFC, I thought I’d ask president-elect Amelie Rousseau what her opinion on the idea was following her election as president. I expected her to say it would likely not happen. Surprise: “It’s trending more toward a kind of Facilities Service that we have (on the ASUO’s budget), as opposed to something for students.”
In light of that, I expected this to be a consensus issue, something everyone in the ASUO was agreed upon, including those at Campus Recycling. So I called Karyn Kaplan today to ask her about it. Wrong again.
“Nobody’s talked to me about it,” she said. She said it would be difficult to convince the University to go along with it anyway. Campus Recycling gets funding from six different sources, including the ASUO, but the parts the ASUO pays for are only the student-aligned ones; jobs, recycling in the EMU, the composting program created by a popular movement among students, etc. Even if Campus Recycling went off the incidental fee, it’s probable that the ASUO would have to pay much of what it already pays through assessments.
Figuring I must have misinterpreted something, I called Rousseau again. She said she’d changed her mind on the idea after talking to Nick Schultz. “I think that it won’t actually save students money,” she said, since it would still fall under tuition. And students, she said, would also get less say in the creation of programs like composting.