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THE DAILY ILLINI The independent student newspaper at the University of Illinois since 1871
WWW.DAILYILLINI.COM
Vol. 143 Issue 75
BY ELEANOR BLACK STAFF WRITER
President Barack Obama signed the Agriculture Act of 2014, otherwise known as the Farm Bill, on Feb. 7 at Michigan State University. The bill authorizes $956 billion to fund agricultural and food policy programs and cuts an estimated $23 billion over the next 10 years in some of these programs. Some significant changes made in the bill include the elimination of the direct payments program for farmers, which will be replaced by an insurance program, and $8 billion worth of cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the next 10 years. As one of the proponents of the bill, Rep. Rodney Davis, R-13, made a statement regarding the bill’s passage in the House on Jan. 29, which he said would provide five years of certainty to America’s rural communities. “I was proud to support this bill because it gives us one of the single largest cuts in mandatory spending that we’ve seen in this Congress and because it is essential that we pass a new, responsible Farm Bill that cuts spending, protects the agriculture community and reforms federal government,” Davis said in the statement. Jonathan Coppess, a clinical assistant professor of law and policy in the college of ACES, had a role in working on the farm bill. He served as the chief counsel for the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. He noted that it has been a three-year process to get the bill reauthorized after the farm bill of 2008 was extended a year, with challenges arising due to its timing. “The reauthorization and need to write the Farm Bill came at about the same time as Congress was overwhelmingly focused on federal spending issues,” he said. “So one of the challenges was, how do you write a bill that spends money to the tune of about $100 billion a year? How do you do that in a Congress that wants to cut spending?” He said that the delay of the bill — which should have been completed and in operation in 2012 — is due to difficulty finding compromise. The two main areas of struggle were the cuts made to SNAP and the design of the farm commodity and subsidy programs. “On the SNAP piece, you had a very political partisan divide — you had Democrats wanting to cut as little as possible or nothing, and you had Republi-
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I Ketut Gede Asnawa, instructor of Gamelan class, is teaching Gamelan, an Indonesia instrument, on Monday.
Parking lot upgrades to LED STAFF WRITER
As a part of its commitment to energy efficient technology, the University upgraded the lights in Parking Lot E-15 to energy efficient, motion-activated lightemitting diodes, or LEDs, after receiving $50,000 in funding from the Student Sustainability Committee. The parking lot on the corner of Fourth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue is one of the first test locations in the state to feature adaptive lighting and the first in Champaign-Urbana to use this technology. “We first heard about this technology at a conference with the Big Ten & Friends Environmental Stewardship Group,” said Morgan Johnston, associate director of sustainability for Facilities and Services. “The Student Sustainability Committee had one of their representatives with us, and they
had indicated that they would be interested in it.” In 2012, the University and other Big Ten institutions formed the Midwest Collaboration for Adaptive Lighting, whose goal is to reduce energy consumption in parking across university campuses and promote adaptive lighting techniques to surrounding communities. “We are a committee that’s looking to bring new technology to campus,” said Marika Nell, chair of the Student Sustainability Committee and senior in Engineering. “We get our funding from student green fees (the Sustainable Campus Environment Fee), so we look into funding projects that will benefit campus and students in some way, and we also help people take risks with new technology.” Lot E-15 was selected as the prime location to be home of the
About LED lighting
• LED lighting is energy efficient. It has an estimated energy efficiency of 80 to 90 percent when compared to traditional lighting and conventional light bulbs. This means that about 80 percent of the electrical energy is converted to light, while 20 percent is lost and converted. • LEDs are extremely durable. They are built with sturdy components that can withstand the roughest conditions including exposure to weather, wind, rain or even external vandalism and trafficrelated public exposure. Also, because of the long life span of LED lights,
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there would be significant energy savings when it comes to maintenance and replacement. • LED lights are free of toxic chemicals and are 100 percent recyclable compared to most conventional fluorescent lighting bulbs that have a variety of materials in them like mercury that are dangerous for the environment. • LED is designed to focus its light and can de directed to a specific location, and well-designed LED systems are able to deliver light more efficiently to the desired location.
SOURCE: LEDLUXOR.COM
Another chance for Freeway BY CLAIRE HETTINGER STAFF WRITER
Even without most of his muzzle, Freeway, a 6-year-old pit-boxer-mastiff mix, is learning new ways to perform his old tricks. With the help of the University Veterinary Teaching Hospital, Freeway was able to overcome Fibrosarcoma, a soft tissue cancer, in November 2013, and he has been on the road to recovery since. Tawnya Mosgrove, a resident of Bellflower, Ill., first noticed
swelling on Freeway’s face after he came inside one day in late October. At first she just thought he was having an allergic reaction or was stung, but as time went on, the swelling worsened, and she decided to take him to his regular vet. The vet took an X-ray, and it was pretty clear that Freeway had a mass on the tissue of his face. When Mosgrove’s vet gave Freeway’s diagnosis, she decided to seek a second opinion from the
University Veterinarian Teaching Hospital. She had never gone to the University before, she said, but it was always a good back-up plan in her mind. Mosgrove wanted the best options for the “gentle giant,” who spends most of his time attached to her in some way — even acting as a 93-pound lap dog. After dropping Freeway off at the hospital, Mosgrove spent the afternoon concerned about Freeway as the vet team performed tests. When she arrived to pick
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Obama signs 1st farm bill in presidency
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him up, Paige Lundberg, veterinary resident, had a smile on her face. She delivered the good news that Freeway’s cancer was confined to his face and had not spread throughout the rest of his body. The next step was to decide on the best option for Freeway. Laura Selmic, small animal soft tissue surgeon at the hospital, with a fellowship in cancer surgery, said Freeway’s story is
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cans wanting to cut a lot more,” Coppess said. “That played out in a fairly destructive matter, if you will, in the summer and fall when the House actually voted down the first farm bill that came up.” David Lloyd, senior policy analyst at the children’s advocacy group Voices for Illinois Children, said the SNAP cuts enacted by the bill will affect almost one million households throughout the United States that will lose an average of $90 in benefits per month. However, the $8 billion SNAP cut is far less than the original $40 billion that some Republicans had originally proposed. But Lloyd said the cuts will only affect some states — not including Illinois — that were using a loophole to give residents increased SNAP benefits. Although Illinois will not be directly affected, the impact on the country as a whole could be detrimental. “That affects the entire national economy, it’s not just isolated to those states necessarily, it’s not good for the country as a whole,” Lloyd said. “But that said, it’s much better than what would’ve been the case if we had enacted $40 billion in cuts. We certainly would have preferred that there had been no cuts, but it was much better than the alternatives that were being proposed.” Overall, Coppess said that the benefits will be “in the eyes of the beholder” and uses the elimination of $5 billion in direct subsidies as an example. He said that in the last few years, the country has seen good prices and strong farm incomes, leading people to ask why payments continued to be made to farmers who are doing well when the U.S. has a federal spending problem. “There are many who view eliminating direct payments as a very good reform, and if you take a very neutral stance on farm policy, it’s very hard to justify a $5 billion stream of payments out to farmers if they don’t have losses and they have good years,” he said. “This is a program that pretty much everybody agreed needed to be cut. But there are farmers who utilize the direct payments, so they may not necessarily think it was a great thing to lose it.” In its place will be an insurance program that aids farmers only when help is needed. Coppess said there is an attempt to provide assistance to farmers when they encounter losses or
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Face behind the arctic apology to Chancellor Wise BY ELIZABETH DYE STAFF WRITER
Snowflakes whirled through the frigid winter air, pelting the face of Luke Dobrovits, sophomore in FAA, as he dragged his feet through several inches of snow. It was around 4:30 a.m. Wednesday, and except for the snow removal team clearing the roads free of grey slush, and perhaps a few squirrels scurrying across the Quad, little life seemed to inhabit the campus. Nevertheless, Dobrovits, bundled in various bulky layers of shirts and jackets, was determined to brave the bone-chilling gusts of wind and snow to finish the design he had started to create. And after three hours of diligently trudging through the tightly packed snow, his work was finally done. The morning sunlight swept over the Quad, revealing Dobrovits’ meticulous
and time-consuming work: two massive words carved out of the slush and snow covering the Quad in front of the Illini Union. The words? Sorry Phyllis. “It just felt like the most appropriate thing to write out in the Quad. I faced the words toward the Union, as a way to represent the campus apologizing to Chancellor Wise,” Dobrovits said. Dobrovits was one of the thousands of University students who, late last January, witnessed the racist and sexist remarks targeted at Chancellor Phyllis Wise after she sent out a Massmail, informing the campus community that the University would still hold classes the next day. “I respected Wise’s snow decision. It was just cold,” Dobrovits said. “It’s fine to have your own opinion, but there was no justification for our fellow students to lash out in the way they did. It was completely uncalled for.”
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He said he hoped his apology on the Quad would atone for the actions of a few of those students, but at the time, Dobrovits had no idea that his middle-of-thenight drawing would gain much attention. “I saw the ‘Sorry Phyllis’ drawing on Twitter before I even saw it on the Quad,” said Dayne Kang, junior in Media. Pictures of Dobrovits’ public apology began popping up on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter within hours of the drawing’s completion. Amassing more than 70 “likes” on the University of Illinois’ Memes Facebook page and more than 300 retweets on Twitter the same day, pictures of Dobrovits’ public apology drew campus-wide attention. “The point of the message was just so students could see it on the Quad the next day. I didn’t really put much thought into it and didn’t
think anyone would really think anything of it,” Dobrovits said. Dobrovits explained that the idea of drawing an apology in the snow came to him as he was walking back to Newman Hall from Flagg Hall, where he spent all night sketching designs late last Tuesday. “I was walking through the snow, back from Flagg, just making zig-zags and other patterns in the snow,” Dobrovits said. “I remembered that there was a bunch of snow on the Quad, and I thought I could go make something there.” Once at the Quad, he composed a quick sketch of his design and began his work. Using a grid-like design, he was able to create a large rectangular box by walking in the snow. Then, he segmented the box, lengthwise, into two halves. He then created five equalsized boxes in the top half and seven boxes directly beneath it.
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“I then walked on the edge of the boxes to make the outline of each letter. Then I stamped down and pushed away the snow surrounding the letters,” Dobrovits explained.
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Because of the massive size of the letters, it took almost three hours to complete, but Dobrovits believed the apology in the snow
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