A rotten spud

Prior to the cancellation of the referendum, the People’s Potato, Concordia’s free-access vegan cafeteria, had asked for a fee levy increase from 27 cents a credit per semester to 37 cents, or, for a fulltime student taking 30 credits a year, about $11 a year. It costs the Potato around $4 to make and serve each meal. The Potato, until 2005, used to operate under the principle that those who ate the meals would donate to defray their costs.
A few years ago, a simple problem emerged – the students who were using this service were reluctant to pay for it. The solution? To levy a fee increase on those students who were not using the service as a way to take the burden off those who were. The majority of Concordia students who do not use the Potato now found themselves paying for those who were unwilling to donate the daily $4 required to feed them.
Apparently, even this wasn’t enough to satiate their burgeoning fiscal obligations. And now the Potato wants to permanently link their fee levy to the Consumer Price Index. This would mean that the Potato would be able to increase their spending every year without ever justifying their new budget either with the CSU or the general student body.
This begs the question; why can’t the Potato make do with what it has?
Last year I discovered that the Potato donates money to certain fringe political causes. Such causes include the Jena 6 campaign, which glorified the actions of six youths who assaulted and hospitalized a classmate, and the legal fund of Patreese Johnson, a woman convicted in 2007 of stabbing a man multiple times while participating in a gang beating in New York City. Both of these causes attempt to justify violent actions of people who have been tried and convicted in court. When I spoke to Gustavo Rodriguez of the Potato, he initially claimed the Potato gave only to causes related to student poverty; when pressed about Jena 6 and others, however, he admitted they did give to other groups, but stressed the amounts were modest. He was not able to provide me with either a list of who they donated to or copies of their past newsletters, but their associations, and their avowed dedication to “class politics” allow an idea to be formed of who the recipients are.
The Potato’s defence is that it only directly contributes money that comes out of student donations to the Potato, and does not technically make donations from the student levy funds. In practice this makes no difference. Both the money donated by students and the fee levy are supposed to offset the Potato’s operating costs. Giving away money donated by students simply creates a demand for more fee money, which in turn facilitates more political activism.
Even if the amounts are negligible, it is inappropriate for an organization that is funded by students to donate money to any cause without student consent. It’s even worse to donate to causes with such narrow bases of support. It means that my levy fee was going to the Potato, which in turn gave money to whomever they choose. In other words, I (and many other students) have been helping support an organization that supports political movements I strongly disagree with.
Rather than continuing to tax all students, who, as the Potato observes, are “typically in debt,” it is time to shift the cost of the service back to the students who eat there. Let them put their money where their mouths are. This ensures that students who do not use the system don’t pay for it, and that the Potato goes back to its role of providing cheap meals for students, and not taking their money and squandering it on their pet political causes.
As of now the fee levy, and the referendum, is dead. But it will almost certainly be resurrected. Perhaps the Potato’s board should save their money for a future budget crisis, rather than giving it away to questionable causes such as Jena 6, and asking the student body to foot the bill.