No new money for CJLO or Void

Both CJLO radio and the Void magazine failed in their attempts to gain new funding from students during last week’s CSU elections, as voters chose not to approve the station’s fee levy increase, nor the creation of a fee levy for the bilingual literary magazine.

According to official results issued by the CSU’s chief electoral officer, CJLO garnered 2,554 votes in favour of increasing its fee levy from $0,25 a credit to $0,34 a credit, compared to 3,330 votes against.

“We’re really disappointed of course, however this is what the majority of voters chose and we respect that choice,” said CJLO’s station manager Katie Seline. “We’re honestly really surprised. We ran a really strong and active campaign. We spoke to over 2,500 students and almost never had a negative reaction.”

Seline indicated that the station will have to reassess its priorities and the projects that it wanted to start, including the expansion of its signal across Montreal. She also pointed out that while taxes and electrical costs continue to go up, CJLO’s funding has stayed the same for the past seven years. The loss at the polls means CJLO will have to increase its fundraising efforts as well as rely more on paid advertising.

“[This] hurts student groups who currently get their advertising for free. We’ll have to limit those spots in favour of paid ads which we wanted to avoid,” said Seline. “We’ll also keep looking into grants and employment funding. The majority of our executive such as our campus outreach coordinator, volunteer coordinator and promo director are working upwards of 20 to 25 hours a week at no pay.”

Seline said she would not change a thing about the intensive campaign run by her staff over the past two weeks, although she does feel that the electoral system is flawed.

“It’s incredibly difficult to be seen amongst a sea of slate posters and given a much smaller campaign budget,” she said.

She indicated CJLO is exploring the option of putting the fee levy increase back on the ballot next semester.

For the Void magazine, the failure to create a two cents a credit fee levy means that one of its major initiatives – paying its contributors – will have to be put on hold.

“[This] makes us sad because people deserve something for the amount of time that it takes to produce their writing and art,” said the Void’s new editor-in-chief Michael Chaulk. “We also won’t be able to get off newsprint, and our page counts and the amount of colour within the issues will depend entirely on how much money we can receive the way we have always received it in the past, through grants and donations.”

Chaulk said that it was hard to take the results easily because they only lost by about 150 votes. The final tally was 2,887 votes in favour, and 3,032 votes against. Chaulk echoed Seline’s view that maybe not all students were aware of the fee levy groups and were not interested in getting informed before voting. But despite not getting the extra money, the Void is optimistic for the future.

“We received a lot of support from a lot of people and we’re grateful for that,” said Chaulk. “We definitely increased our presence in the school, which will help us in many ways. For one, the amount and quality of submissions that came in for the issue we’re putting together right now was staggering.”

The Void is also hoping to put the fee levy back on the ballot sometime soon.

As for Queer Concordia, the lone fee levy victor, it hopes to begin planning for the future as soon as possible. A mere 58 votes sealed the collective’s fate – 2,953 students voted in favour of the two cents per credit fee levy, versus 2,895 votes against.

“We will be having a meeting this Thursday to begin planning our AGM and moving toward becoming a not-for-profit organization,” said collective member Joey Donnelly. “We’re looking forward to making our space more accessible, developing the safer-sex program and hiring a part-time coordinator to do more outreach. Since Friday, Queer Concordia is facing a whole new reality.”

 

1 comment

  1. Its not a good time for increasing fee levies since tuition is projected to increase by 75% in the next six years. Its hipocritical to fight for tuition freeze yet push for students to spend their last few dollars on stuff most students do not even use.

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