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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2018
volume
119,
issue
NEWS
OPINION
LIFE&ARTS
SPORTS
Drag queens come to PCL to teach children about the LGBTQ community. PA G E 3
Sid Richardson Hall deserves a new name that reflects the building’s diversity. PA G E 4
Oil portraits paint a new face for the homeless in Austin. PA G E 8
A former victim of bullying, Texas center Sedona Prince now takes a stand. PA G E 6
CITY
73
CAMPUS
Long Live Snowpea
Austin leads Texas with highest levels of reported hate crimes
Campus mourns death of “albino” squirrel. She is survived by her children.
By Megan Menchaca @meganmenhaca13
Austin led Texas in reported hate crimes in 2017, according to the FBI Hate Crime Statistics report. According to the report, Austin had 18 hate crimes — 10 of which were motivated by race, ethnicity or ancestry, four by sexual orientation, three by religion and one by gender identity. Dallas had the second most in Texas with 14 reported hate crimes. Fort Worth had 13, and Houston had eight. Renee Lafair, regional director of the Austin Anti-Defamation League, said Austin has the most hate crimes in Texas because of increased efforts by local law enforcement to report them. “If there is a potential assault that was done because of a person’s race or ethnicity or gender, that could be a hate crime, but sometimes it’s not recognized,” Lafair said. “Law enforcement has to recognize them and particularly have to check a box … but there’s an awful lot of people who don’t check the boxes.” Kachina Clark, Austin Police Department Victim Services manager, said detectives, officers, counselors and an internal review board regularly use FBI guidelines to evaluate if crimes were motivated by prejudice. The Austin Police Department is also a member of the Austin-Travis County Hate Crimes Task Force, a group of more HATE CRIMES
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this community The squir@LaurenGrobe rels living on campus are fox n squirrels, and the Nov. 11, “albino” squirrels, such as Snowpea the Snowpea, are actually leucistic, “albino” squirrel was found dead biology professor David Hillis said. near the Gates Dell Complex. She is Leucism is a condition that decreases survived by her children. melanin production, giving the squirThe Squirrels of UT Facebook and rels a blonde appearance. This is differInstagram pages document the ent from albinism, where there is little to no many squirrels that live on melanin production. campus, includ“Most Texas fox squirrels are the more common reding Snowdish-brown that we see a lot on campus, but we have a highpea. Marie er frequency of squirrels with the leucistic coloration,” Romano, Hillis said. creator of Carin Peterson, outreach coordinator for Environmental the page and 2016 UT alumna, photoHealth and Safety, said UT has an overabundance of squirrels. graphs the squirrels and notes their “Feeding them leads to an artificial population growth, and different behaviors. Romano said we’ve got an overpopulation,” Snowpea likely fell from a tree. Peterson said. “I went to go see her, and Hillis said a lack of predathere was a blonde squirrel that tors has allowed the leucistic was unconscious on the floor,” squirrel population to expand. Romano said. “Since our campus squirRomano took pictures of the squirrels get a lot of food from rels while attending UT until 2016. She humans who feed them started posting her pictures to the page and humans like the white last April. coloration, being white could “I wanted to keep track of (the squirrels),” Romano even be an advantage for camsaid. “I would name them myself, and it was fun to take pus squirrels,” Hillis said. pictures of them and remember them.” Peterson recommends stuThe Facebook and Instagram pages currently have 145 dents to view the squirrels from and 4,342 followers, respectively. Romano said her followers often send in pictures of their own. S Q U I R R E L S page 2 “Students will support me,” Romano said. “Even some professors keep in contact with me, so it’s nice to have andrew choi | the daily texan staff
By Lauren Grobe
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CITY
STATE
GOP experts reflect on party’s future after midterm elections By Chad Lyle @lylechad
| the daily texan staff Three UT students leave West Campus apartment complex 26 West. There have been efforts to form a West Campus neighborhood association to make sure that the neighborhood inhabited primarily by students is not neglected. elizabeth garabedian
New neighborhood association forms By Raga Justin @ragajus
West Campus has problems, and Allie Runas wants to fix them. Runas, an electrical and computer engineering senior, is currently in the process of organizing a West Campus neighborhood association. She said she was spurred to begin a resident-driven housing authority for the neighborhood to tackle some of the issues she’s seen in her last two years of living there, as well as to promote underrepresented voices in the area. “A lot of people in our neighborhood are renters and young,” Runas said. “I’m trying to make sure they’re not being taken advantage of and that they know the resources that are available to them.” Runas said sidewalk accessibility is the main priority, with many cracked and uneven or too narrow and dangerous to walk on. She also wants to be able to enforce tenants’ rights as well as see tangible progress on the West Campus lighting survey. The survey studies where lighting should be added in
West Campus. “I want it to serve as a formal reminder to (the) City Council, like, ‘Hey, don’t forget about us,’” Runas said. Around 25 people are involved with or have expressed interest in the process to get the association off the ground, Runas said. While most are students, she said the association will not exclude older renters and homeowners in the area in order to make it more transparent and accessible. Forming an association requires only paperwork and must be approved by the city. West Campus does have an existing neighborhood association, the University Area Partners, which has covered the area since 1991. Founding member Mike McHone, a real estate broker, said the Partners have already contributed much to the area, and worries about the sustainability of a student-led housing authority. “Why don’t they just come on over and help us out?” McHone said. “I think it would be much more effective if all of us worked together … rather than creating more chaos and confusion.” However, Runas said she’s never seen
University Area Partners advertise involvement to the student population. “I decided to step up and make something that would fit the kind of neighborhood association I was looking for,” Runas said. “I realized that they tend to carry a lot of weight, and then you can go into the City Council and not just speak on behalf of yourself but speak on behalf of the neighborhood.” The organization will advertise its first general meeting, which Runas said she hopes will be in January. Assistant architecture professor Jake Wegmann said increased participation from renters will ultimately create a better housing culture in Austin and said he thought it was a “fantastic” initiative. “I don’t know how exactly it’ll play out but it surely can’t hurt,” Wegmann said. “It’s so easy for something like that to get pushed to the bottom of the priority list. But if there’s someone who is shining a spotlight on these issues and doing their homework … that’s the kind of stuff that makes things happen in cities.” Even younger renters new to the city
WEST CAMPUS
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The Republican Party has been the dominant political force in Texas for decades, but in the aftermath of the recent midterm elections, signs of competition are starting to appear across the state’s political landscape. Although Republicans held onto every statewide seat, and no Democrat has been elected to statewide office since 1994, the margins in key races were closer than they had been in several years. Matt Mackowiak, chairman of the Travis County Republican Party, said there are some worrying signs for Republicans in the midterm results. “Democrats got further than they’ve been anytime in the last 20 years,” Mackowiak said. “If you look at lieutenant governor, agriculture commissioner and attorney general, those three races were all under five points and … U.S. Senate was the closest at 2.6 percent.” Mackowiak attributed many of these gains to suburban areas where Republicans typically perform better. “We always get beat badly in the urban areas,” Mackowiak said. “But there were some really poor results in some suburban areas in Tarrant County, in Fort Bend, Williamson and Hays. Even some of those other counties in (North Texas) that had been pretty strong Republican areas, like Denton and Collin, moved meaningfully in the Democratic direction.” Government professor David Prindle said demographic changes in the state likely contributed to gains made by Democrats and noted Latinx and African American Texans are now roughly the same percentage of the state’s population as white people. “Anglos tend to be much more conservative than Latinos and
African Americans (and) tend to have much higher voter turnout rates,” Prindle said. “If Latinos and African Americans would turn out to vote at the same rate as Anglos, Texas might become a blue state, or at least purple.” Mackowiak said Democrats were successful in part because they nominated candidates like El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke. He also said the absence of straight-ticket voting, where voters can opt to cast ballots for every Democrat or every Republican candidate, will hurt Democrats in future elections.
If you look at lieutenant governor, agriculture commissioner and attorney general, those three races were all under five points and … U.S. Senate was the closest at 2.6 percent.” M AT T M A C KO W I A K
TRAVIS COUNTY GOP CHAIRMAN
“What I think the Democrats have working against them is it’s a huge question about whether they’ll have someone like Beto again,” Mackowiak said. “He didn’t win his race, but he won a lot of other races. I mean (Democrats) flipped 12 state House seats, they flipped two state Senate seats, they flipped two congressional seats and they were pretty close to a lot of other seats.”
GOP
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