OPINION: LANE4’s Campustown renovation debate
MONDAY
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January 24, 2011 | Volume 206 | Number 85 | 40 cents | An independent student newspaper serving Iowa State since 1890. ™
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Dance Marathon
Campus
Renovations to Lied nearing completion By Karen.Jennings iowastatedaily.com Candles sit on a table in the back of the Great Hall in the Memorial Union on Saturday. These candles were burning in remembrance of Dance Marathon children that have passed away. Photo: Kelsey Kremer/Iowa State Daily
Hannah Hebron, senior in elementary education, and Austin Dobbels, junior in agricultural biochemistry, take a break from dancing and play Twister during Dance Marathon on Saturday in the Memorial Union. Photo: Kelsey Kremer/Iowa State Daily
Lied Recreation Athletic Center is under renovations, and most of them are currently in the completion stage. Due to the August floods, Lied has had areas in the facility renovated, said Michael Giles, director of recreation services. “The total replacement is about $500,000,” Giles said. “Funding for Lied damage repairs will come from insurance and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Renovations include new turf in the track area, new racquetball courts, new flooring in hallways, replacing service desk furniture and installing new athletic lockers, Giles said. Most of the renovations have been completed. The turf and racquetball courts have been completed and flooring is nearing completion. There will also be new installments in the women’s and men’s locker rooms. “[The reason for renovations to locker rooms is] to allow for removal of existing lockers and install new lockers,” Giles said. The men’s locker rooms will be temporarily closed for renovations.
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Multicultural
Students fill the Great Hall of the Memorial Union on Saturday for the Dance Marathon Morale Dance, a dance the participants do once each hour for 15 hours. The dancers spend the entire day on their feet dancing and playing games with children from the Children’s Miracle Network. This year’s Dance Marathon event raised $264,000 for the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital. Photo: Kelsey Kremer/Iowa State Daily
Students from Dance Marathon perform a dance Saturday in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union. Participants are required to fundraise $200 on their own in order to attend the annual 15-hour event. Photo: Yue Wu /Iowa State Daily
Facets of fundraising Student raises $10,000 through video contest By Frances.Myers iowastatedaily.com Anyone who came to the Memorial Union on Saturday found it was flooded in teal. All day and into the night, ISU Dance Marathon held its 14th annual 15-hour fundraising event, called “Kickin’ it for the Kids.” This year’s event raised $264,000, which will go directly to the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital through Children’s Miracle Network in order to help children with life-threatening illnesses, giving financial and emotional support to hundreds of families across Iowa. Fundraising for Dance Marathon is done throughout the year. In order to attend the annual event members must raise at least $200 on their own accord. Small fundraising events are held throughout the year to help members reach their goal. Some members will find their own ways to raise money such as creating online donation pages or asking fam-
Video Refer:
$264,000 The amount of money this year’s event raised. The money will go directly to the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital through the Children’s Miracle Network. It will help provide support to children with life-threatening illnesses, and to these children’s families.
ily and friends. One ISU Dance Marathon member chose a slightly different way to raise some money. Tyler Stafford, senior in advertising, entered the Ford Focus Global Test Drive Contest in late December in an attempt to win $10,000. Applicants for this contest were told to submit a short video that was no longer than two minutes in length explaining why they should be considered to be a test driver for the 2012 Ford Focus, how they would start something for a good cause with $10,000 and how they were uniquely qualified to create user-generated content based on activities during the program. “It seemed easy enough,” Stafford said. “Make a video, get people to vote, potentially win
Look for coverage of Dance Marathon’s event on channel 18 on Tuesday’s Newswatch program at 6:30 p.m. $10,000. Even if my chances were not good, I figured I might as well throw my hat in.” Stafford has been active in Dance Marathon for four years. Dance Marathon is an organization Stafford is nothing short of passionate about. “Very few organizations give you the opportunity to truly see how your money is affecting the lives of others. Dance Marathon does that, and to me that is very moving,” he said. Stafford entered the contest about a week after it started in hopes of winning the prize money and using it to create an educational fund for ISU Dance Marathon. “The educational fund could go to a lot of different things: scholarships to college for college-bound miracle children, tutors for the kids while in the hospital so they don’t get left behind or school supplies for the kids when they are out of the hospital,” Stafford said. When he first entered the contest, Stafford had no high expectations of winning. “To be totally honest I thought
my chances were pretty slim,” Stafford said. “There were some problems with me choosing Dance Marathon from the get-go because it didn’t fall under one of the three categories that Ford wanted the charities to fall under — Education, Environment or Hunger. Because Dance Marathon didn’t fall under one of these three categories, I decided to tweak it and propose that the money would go to start an educational fund within Dance Marathon. It took a while for Ford to approve it, but after a few weeks of my video being up, they did. “I first went to my YouTube fan base,” Stafford said. “I have over 18,000 subscribers on YouTube, and they are the best YouTube fans in the world. That helped a lot. I also then made a Facebook group to remind people that they could vote every day for the contest, and I would send out annoying spam through the group to give these daily reminders. It was well worth it.” Within a few days, Stafford’s
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Ames
Q&A
Support services work to close gap By Jaleesa.Epps iowastatedaily.com Iowa State is home to more than 27,000 students who come for a college education. Included in the university’s population are students from diverse backgrounds. Recent and past studies have shown that students from particular backgrounds are less likely to graduate from college than the majority. Research links financial difficulties to dropout rates. A considerable amount of college dropouts come from low income families, first generation students and students who have limited English proficiency. Nationally, 57 percent of students complete their bachelor’s degrees within six years, but the percentages are even lower for Blacks and Latinos. Nationally, only 49 percent of Latinos and 40 percent of Blacks graduate within six years. “There are several reasons why students of color may drop out,” said Santos Nunez Galicia, assistant dean of students and director of Multicultural Student Affairs. “Sometimes it could be academic preparedness, and other times it could be from a lack of a support system. Students need to feel like
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Water and pollution
Fluoride level decreased in Ames’ water By Elisse.Lorenc iowastatedaily.com
Schainker: ‘[LANE4] wants to enter into a memorandum of understanding’
Schainker: Well first of all, they tried to get substantial input from different parts of the community over the last nine or 10 months, maybe it’s been longer, and they’re putting together
The city of Ames Water and Pollution Control Department lowered fluoridation levels in Ames’ drinking water from 1.0 milligrams to .07 milligrams Jan. 13. The department was driven by data collected from organizations such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. “Fluoride is just a natural mineral that occurs in our water at a level of about 0.3 to 0.4 [milligrams] per liter,” said Phil Propes, superintendent of the Ames Water Treatment Plant. “The American Dental Association and other research groups have found that about 1.0 [milligrams] per liter of fluoride is an optimum amount to help prevent tooth decays. So we supplemented the naturally-found fluoride in our groundwater and brought it up to 1.0 [milligrams] until Monday.” The department was relying on six to seven years worth of research that the CDC and EPA had been jointly collecting, said John Dunn, director of Ames Water and Pollution Control. “We sat in a webcast [Tuesday] that was led by the EPA and the CDC, and they were
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Ames City Manager
Editor’s Note The following Q&A is between Jason Arment, opinion editor, and Steve Schainker, Ames City Manager. This is the first in a weeklong series of interviews with members of the Ames and ISU community about the changes LANE4 proposes to make in Campustown.
By Jason.Arment iowastatedaily.com Arment: For Campustown’s renovation, we had heard that it was maybe going to be considered that eminent domain be used to get properties so that renovation could go forward on Lincoln Way. Is that factual? Is eminent domain being considered? Schainker: The next step how we thought it was
going to be, they were going to come forward at the next council meeting, but I don’t think it will be until the end of February, beginning of March. LANE4 will come before the city, and I think, before they move on to their next step — which will be going from broad concepts into more detailed — they’re going to have to spend a lot of money to hire consultants. They want to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the city and the university to get some agreement on some broad concepts. So at that time, they’ll be proposing a memorandum of understanding that will, I think, try to lay out the incentives or what they need from the city and what they need from the university. So I think we’ll know at that time what their final position is or what their position is going to be. I think in the interim, they’re trying to contact property owners and trying to negotiate the purchase of those properties, and they’re try-
ing that to get some early estimates of what the construction costs will be. When you add the land costs and the construction costs, they’re going to have to determine how much they’re going to ask in the way of incentives from the city of Ames, so I think all those specifics will be clarified or brought up by LANE4 by the end of February I think — within a month. Arment: So what I understand is that LANE4 wants some reassurance that if they do go to the trouble of laying this out, when it’s all said and done they will be able to go ahead with it.