Students Cheer Defeat of Fee Hike

It is a lesson in ballot-box democracy that students at the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge won’t soon forget.

Up in arms over a proposed fee increase, students in Ventura rallied to help beat back a referendum that would have boosted fees by $75 over three years to pay for a $20-million fitness center at CSUN’s main campus.

The measure was defeated by a 55-vote margin in balloting Tuesday and Wednesday at both campuses. More than 20% of the students at the Ventura campus--387 of the 1,650 full- and part-time students--voted in the election, compared to a turnout of just 5% at the main campus in Northridge.

Reveling in their success Thursday, student leaders credited an aggressive campaign over the past few weeks with persuading fellow students to refuse to pay for a facility they didn’t want and wouldn’t use.

“Our students did it,” said an exuberant Christina Martinez, president of the Associated Students group at the Ventura campus. “One vote here and there did it. It’s a feat to be proud of.”

The referendum asked students whether they would be willing to raise Associated Students fees by $30 per semester starting next fall, $30 more in the fall of 2000 and an additional $15 in 2001. The $75 total increase would have stayed in place indefinitely.

Most of the money would have been used to pay for construction and operation of the recreation center, while some would have gone toward increasing financial aid.

Students at the Ventura campus had asked to be exempt from the fee increase, reasoning that they would not have ready access to the new center 50 miles away.

But the Associated Students organization at the main campus--which governs nonacademic campus activities--decided that all CSUN students should have to share the financial burden.

That’s when local student leaders leaped into action, putting up posters and going classroom to classroom to lobby against the measure.

“The students spoke very loudly,” said Steve Lefevre, director of CSUN’s Ventura campus. “And I think it lets everyone know that students need to be consulted on these sorts of issues.”

Officials with the Associated Students on CSUN’s main campus did not return repeated phone calls Thursday.

The fee revolt touched a nerve at the local campus, where many students have long nursed resentment over the services they receive for the fees they pay. Students are assessed $60 a semester by Associated Students but see only a small fraction of that spent in Ventura.

Now that the referendum has been defeated, Martinez and other student leaders said, they will turn their attention to increasing the Associated Students budget for the Ventura campus. There is currently a local proposal to increase that budget from $5,000 to $56,530 next year.

About $22,000 of that would be earmarked for child-care services at the campus, where the average age of students is 35 and most are working parents.

“I think we need to do everything we can to take this example, learn from it and apply it to other things,” said Tamara Murphree, a member of the student senate at the Ventura campus.