New officials elected to the ASC

By Greg Zeman
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Ryan Vanderpol, of the VOICE slate, who was seen on Ocean campus wearing a superman costume during election day, emerged as the victor in a hard-fought campaign for the position of Ocean Campus Associated Student Council President.

Vanderpol did not leap the competition in a single bound however, defeating Alicia Dominguez of the United Students for Change slate by a narrow margin of 12 votes.

Vanderpol will have to content with the majority the USFC slate will occupy when he and the other ASC elects take office on July 1. The USFC slate dominated the election with 11 of 15 ASC senate seats.. From the VOICE slate only Marielle Bautista was elected, while Old School slate members Faafetai Tupua and Mei Xuan managed to secure two spots. The last senate seat went to Dave Diamond Whitaker, the only independent senator.

In addition to selecting a president and senators, student voters chose outgoing ASC president Joshua Nielsen as their new student trustee. In a student voter guide Nielsen has stated budget cuts and affordable tuition as his main priorities. The message seems to have resonated with student voters impacted by financial cuts. Nielsen won in a landslide victory with 464 votes, 379 votes ahead of his closest competition.

Funding cuts at City College were definitely on the minds of students at the polls.

“I would like to see the cost per unit go down,” said student voter Jessica Laura Hardwick, as she struggled against gusts of wind to fill out her ballot with a tiny pencil. Hardwick is just one of the 985 student voters on Ocean campus who turned out for this year’s election, increasing the turnout from last year by 781 ballots.

Mario Marquez, a poll worker on Ocean campus, said of the turnout, “I think we’ve quadrupled what we had last year, Pamela Ward (ASC election commissioner) has done a great job.”

Some students were so enthusiastic about voting that they ran through the Cloud Science Mall shouting jubilantly, “We voted! We’re voters,” after casting their ballots.

“One of the main changes we want is to make the resources actually accessible to students. There are a lot of programs, things like tutoring, counseling and book loan, which are very useful to students, but they don’t know about them. So we want to make a change so students do know about them and do use them,” said Laura Medina, a senator elect from the USFC slate.

USFC slate senator elect Eloy Najera addressed the issue of student safety on campus.

“We don’t want any more crimes or any more people getting robbed. Basically we want people to feel safe on campus instead of worrying about who’s going to be behind them,” Najera said. He listed several solutions being explored by ASC members, including security call boxes, more lights on campus and the possible involvement of an outside volunteer security force to augment campus security.

“I feel like they’ve got a pretty good security force on campus already, but maybe we could just step it up a little bit,”  Najera said.

All ASC members seem to agree on the need for better communication between students and departments on campus providing student services, especially services for new students.

“Those tools are there to empower the student body, but sometimes they don’t reach out to students who face obstacles,” said Medina.