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Addition on jurisdiction made Student Rec Center provides Football wins Homecoming Le Castle Vania: inside Bishop Eddie Long accused to Student Code of Conduct. new services for students. game against Morehead. the world of Dylan Eiland. of sexual misconduct.
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SIGNAL
MARTA continues to cut back By ASHLEIGH ATWELL Staff Writer
Last week, MARTA implemented several changes to their system in an effort to make up for financial woes and budget cuts. The changes went into effect on Sept. 25 and included reduced train and bus service, bathroom closings and other various changes. According to the Atlanta JournalConstitution, MARTA is facing a $109 million deficit. MARTA had been warning the public about the impending changes for months by word of mouth, passing out pamphlets and posting flyers. These changes coincide with price raises that will go into effect in October and have caused Georgia State students and faculty to pay a higher price for their discounted Breeze tickets. According to the AJC, MARTA has eliminated 2,700 of its 11,500 stops. Those stops have been marked with signs and the changes are explained in detail on the MARTA website. MARTA has also cut train service by 14 percent. Train service will now start at 6 a.m., an hour later than usual, and trains that run at night will have fewer cars. There have also been changes made to the Breeze system. Breeze tickets, which used to be reloadable for up to 90 days, are not reloadable at all anymore. Breeze tickets will remain priced at 50 cents but Breeze cards now cost $1 rather than $5. MARTA has been plagued with issues. In January, MARTA shut down 100 of 149 escalators for a costly repair plan that is projected to continue into 2011. According to WSB-TV News, the escalators were shut down after a mechanic knowingly ignored a safety circuit on an escalator in Dunwoody Station. The repairs reportedly cost $1 million. MARTA is the only major transit line not owned or funded by the government and this has contributed to a lot of its financial problems. Bills have been proposed to help MARTA, but as a result of a troubled relationship with Georgia lawmakers, the bills have been rejected. According to the AJC, a new law allowing for new Cont. on page 06
MARTA
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Confusion in SGA leaves Georgia State out of debate
Daniel Beauregard • Signal
Candidates for Governor face off at the Georgia Public Broadcasting studio.
By MIRANDA SAIN Staff Writer and DANIEL BEAUREGARD News Editor Georgia State was not one of the participating schools for the first student-led gubernatorial debate, which aired Oct. 3. Georgia Tech’s Student Government Association, which coordinated and hosted the event, said that Georgia State’s Student Government Association failed to respond to partnership and participation requests. “I e-mailed James [Dutton, SGA President] on Sept. 7 and Sept. 14 and never got a response back from him and we had a limited number of seats and had to move forward in looking for other partners so we had to offer the opportunity to other universities,” said Georgia Tech’s SGA Director of External Affairs and special assistant to the Georgia Tech SGA President, Elle Creel. “We had e-mailed James Dutton twice, contacting him to see if Georgia State wanted to be a partner and we never heard back both of those times. Apparently, it was communicated with us the other day that the e-mail had been passed on to the finance team and he assumed that they had taken care of it,” said Georgia Tech’s SGA Student Lobby Board Chair, Kristin Greig. Dutton said that he did receive
the e-mails and passed them on to the rest of the SGA members. Dutton said the Georgia State SGA decided not to participate because Georgia Tech was requesting a $1,000 participation fee. “I wouldn’t spend $1,000 of my money, so why would I spend $1,000 of others? It just wasn’t something we wanted to spend students’ money on,” Dutton said. The participating schools that paid the $1,000 fee and organized the event are Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Morehouse College and Georgia College and State University. Dutton said that by declining the $1,000 fee to participate, Georgia State allowed for a smaller university like Morehouse College to participate in the event. Instead of taking on a financially supporting role “we’re taking a question answering role,” he said. Dutton did say that Georgia State has “helped with the logistics” in organizing the event. However, both Creel and Greig refuted Dutton’s claim. Dutton said that all of his communication has been to Georgia Tech’s SGA President, Corey Boone. However, according to Boone, after an initial inquiry about the debate during the summer, Boone has had no communications with Dutton. There is also conflict in who originated the idea for the first
student-led gubernatorial debate. “It was the coordination between Corey Boone and myself that lead to the idea originally to even create the debate,” Dutton said. “The idea has been around for a while and we’ve tried to get this going in the past, and it really came into fruition this year. The main coordinators have been myself and our Student Government President Corey Boone, and our Director of External Affairs, Elle Creel. We’ve worked with some of our administrators and we worked very closely with Georgia Public Broadcasting to make this happen and they’ve been really awesome partners with us throughout the whole process,” Greig said. “For the past couple of years, it’s been something that has been talked about in the our student government. Then this past spring, we contacted all of the candidates and then once the primaries were finished, myself, and Kristin, and our president Corey Boone contacted them again, and contacted Georgia Public Broadcasting about setting up a partnership with them to broadcast the debate so essentially it came out of our student government,” Creel said. “The idea was initiated out of the Georgia Tech SGA and was presented to UGA and GSU last Spring,” Boone said. Georgia State did participate
by submitting a video question that the SGA put together with the help of GSTV. The question asked the candidates their stance on undocumented students. “We’re taking a question asking role,” Dutton said. “It doesn’t matter who is sitting in the room… what it is important is the questions we ask.” The candidates were given an opportunity to ask each other several questions and field questions from a student panel. Video questions were presented from several schools around Georgia, including Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville and Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton. According to Kristen Greig, Georgia State did submit a video question but it was a duplicate question that they also received from Georgia College and State University, and since questions were on a first come first serve basis, Georgia State was not included in the program. The debate was an effort to increase voter participation among college students. The gubernatorial debate was between the three candidates in the race: Roy Barnes (D), Nathan Deal (R) and John Monds (L) with Susan Hoffman, a Georgia Public Broadcasting host and producer, moderating the event.