University of Utah Student Newspapers--The Chronicle | 2010-02-17 | Page 6

6d OPINION Fdaim Sustainability fees could be put to better use www.dailyutahchronicle.com 1\4 y parents always took me camping when I was a kid. When I got older, I got pretHIKARI ty serious about backpacking and other backcountry LOFTUS activities. I soon became so obsessed with my love of the outdoors that I became a Junior, Mass Communication member of the Sierra Club, preached "No Trace" camping of all the money we will have and recycling and basically besaved. However, most projects came a tree-hugging activist. that promote sustainability are I've mellowed out now I quite expensive. Solar panels—a might not be a card-carrying big favorite for sustainabilitymember of the Sierra Club on average take about io to 15 anymore, but I still do my part years to break even. Solar hot to conserve the planet, and water panels take about eight to 12 years. that's why I surprised myself by getting upset over the new That probably doesn't seem Sustainable Campus Initiative like too long of a time, but most Grant Program—another project solar panels come with a warcosting us money, amid all the ranty of only 20 to 25 years. If halfway done construction we put in solar panels, io years projects we don't have money from now there will potentially to finish. The U needs to get its be fewer fee increases, and 20 priorities straight. years from now we'll have to The new program provides start all over again. It seems funding for projects that reduce more practical to me to hook up the negative impact the U has generators to the machines in on the environment, making the the Field House. Generators are U more sustainable. Students cheaper, and the machines are or employees come up with always occupied and running. ideas that increase the amount There are about 29,00o stuof renewable energy used or dents at the U. That means the produced on campus, increase U is putting roughly $72,500 a energy efficiency, reduce water semester into the sustainability use and waste and increase program. Whitney Williams, the cooroperations efficiency, according to the Office of Sustainability's dinator for the program, said the website. amount collected each semester Who is going to sustain this has to be used in the semester it program? Apparently, students was collected, resulting in sevare. There has been a $5 increase eral smaller projects. How many in student fees to support the things can we change before we program, and U students paid run out of small projects? Wilit, whether they knew it or not, liams also mentioned that some starting in the 2009 Fall Semesof the groups with proposed ter. It doesn't sound like much, projects have found outside but when my tuition goes up funding. this fall, every dollar matters to I believe that the program has me. every good intention, and the It's not that I think the procause is certainly a good one. gram is a bad idea—the green However, if students are passide of my brain says that $5 is sionate enough about a project a small price to pay to clean to find outside funding, why are up our act on campus—it's the we adding more fees to already timing that's wrong. If the U rising costs at the U? If we aren't wants to start going green, it saving up for big projects, I can start with all the running don't see why we need to start or idling construction vehicles a new project that will cost on campus. With all the budstudents now Instead of piling on new projget cuts causing delays in the campus construction projects, ects and new costs, I think that I'd rather give my $5 to getting it's time that we started concenthe construction done faster so trating on finishing the projects I don't have to make a io minute that we already have started and walking detour to get to class. working on ways that can bring The new program says "going tuition down. If we don't, the U green" will reduce the universiis going to be a university that is ty's spending and that we as stufull of good intentions, halfway dents can potentially minimize done projects and no students. future fee increases because [e-mail] S Q‹,6 • '1 1 11- V V. #‘/JS -/b< 1%) WI L LUS BRANHAM/The Daily Utah Chronicle Barring e-signatures unfairly blocks citizen ethics proposal E thics reform is still running an obstacle course in order to be passed in Utah, even with two competing ethics reform packages: one initiative proposed by Utahns for Ethical Government and an amendment conglomerate from the Utah State Legislature. Last week, Lt. Gov. Greg Bell, Utah's Chief Elections Officer, issued a press release that said, according to an opinion from Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, electronic signatures on petitions are no longer valid. This is a step backward for citizens' involvement in their democracy. The Utah government is attempting to insulate itself from public opinion. First, the Legislature proposed a weakened and vague set of amendments that will trump the UEG's movement, if citizens don't vote it down in the November elections. Next, it attempted a freeze of initiatives all together. With electronic signatures out, the combined political machine is trying to stall the popular ethics reform that it didn't see coming. UEG responded with a press release. Kim Burningham, chairman of the UEG's executive committee said, "It's just another in a string of obstacles our elected representatives have erected to prevent themselves BRANDON BEIFUSS Sophomore, Economics from being held accountable to the people of Utah. We will fight it." Shurtleff was indubitably under pressure from the Legislature to attempt to slow the initiative, and this move is logically flawed. Shurtleff's opinion is five pages and gives reasons for the ban. Shurtleff argued that since the signatures did not happen in front of a circulator of the petition, they are invalid. Although this is an existing statute in Utah code, it can be argued that the webmaster of the UEG counts as an administrator of the petition. Shurtleff is making a lunge at legal logic, and he falls short. For people who have handwriting anywhere near as terrible as mine, the information necessary to sign the petition online—date of birth, full name, full address and e-mail— is printed, which makes the county clerk's job of verification easier. There is no basis for barring these signatures, as they can be verified just as easily as hand-written signatures. The most freeform legal reading comes near the end of his opinion. Shurtleff cites Utah code that says "nothing in this chapter requires the state government agency to: (a) conduct transaction by electronic means; or (b) use or permit the use of electronic records or electronic signatures." Although this says the state doesn't have to accept electronic signatures, this same code could be used to bar electronic tax filing under the records portion in part B. Shurtleff interprets this to mean that Utah does not accept signatures, when it only reads that the state does not have to. Just because Utah doesn't have to accept them doesn't mean that we should neglect the past 5o years of technological development. Shurtleff's opinion is a faulty, opportunistic stalling method. There is little legal backing, and the UEG is preparing to sue for the right to use electronic signatures. Utah's citizens should be embarrassed that io years after the turn of the century, our attorney general is trying to turn back the clock and say verifiably accurate data is unacceptable. [e-mail] Medicaid's excess funds should be given back to taxpayers fter an internal audit in January, Utah's Medicaid administrators discovered that they could be saving, as a conservative estimate, $19.3 million. This is reason for concern, and in the short run, any recovered money should be given back to the people and not passed on to some other project that the state would otherwise consider infeasible. Two important questions must be asked as we try to understand these matters: What are the forces that motivate administrators outside of government institutions, like business people, to keep a tight budget? What portion of that isn't present in Utah's Medicaid? Whatever the answers are, we have 19 million reasons to believe that either Medicaid administrators have no interest in efficiency or they don't know how to be efficient—and the truth might lie somewhere in between. Two Soviet economists, Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov, candidly wrote that production enterprises A First-year Medical Student in the USSR "always ask for more than they need...regardless of how much they actually need." According to them, "Nobody 'at the top' knows exactly what the real requirements are," so "squandering" makes sense. Their central thesis was that knowledge "the top" needed in order to prevent corrupt surpluses in some places and unjust shortages in others wasn't available. Inefficiencies ensue from not knowing who really needs what. The same is probably partially true of Medicaid. In his essay titled "The Use of Knowledge in Society," the Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich Hayek described, 45 years before Shmelev and Popov, this "problem of the utilization of knowledge." Hayek said, "A little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place." Medicaid administrators probably don't know exactly how much their beneficiaries truly need because knowledge of "time and place" isn't readily available to them. To inquire for such knowledge would mean expropriation of freedoms, one of them being privacy. Imagine a government officer looking at your chest X-ray or pelvic exam results so he or she could collect the information necessary to fund your treatment properly. This is the kind of information—the "knowledge of particular circumstances"—Medicaid needs, but to get it would mean violation of dearly held privacy. Because Medicaid can't possibly know every detail it needs, it designs programs based on "general rules" that don't target efficiency. Usually those rules ensure that more is done than necessary because, in medicine, too much is usually safer than too little—or at least it feels that way. Giving the money back to the people would allow individuals to eliminate unneeded treatments and thus increase efficiency. Not only would reimbursement of unneeded Medicaid funding do more good by letting people who know their circumstances better than Medicaid take care of themselves, it would ensure a maximization of freedom to others, unseen. It is perhaps too uncommonly known that the freedom of a few is sacrificed for the wants of the many. The Utah State Tax Commission found in its 2009 report that 81.1 percent of income tax dollars, much of which funds Medicaid, come from 19 percent of the population, all of whom don't qualify for Puzzle genius? Become a page designer for the Chronicle! Contact Alyssa Whitney at [e-mail] the program. In other words, this minority of Utahns are selectively expected to not benefit from a program to which they are primary benefactors. The freedom they lose by taxation should be guarded soberly, and if the state has the chance to give it back to them, even in miniscule amounts, they should look for the opportunity eagerly. Some have suggested that the extra money be put into the School of Medicine, to bring back up the number of students from 82 to the original figure of 102. The school's budget was cut short because Medicaid is more of a state priority. Although Utah House of Representatives Minority Leader David Litvack said it would be technically impossible, this suggestion ignores the possibility that the people will probably make better choices for themselves at the lowest possible expense of freedom. Freedom, after all, is such a rare commodity. [e-mail]