Vol. 61 NO. 21
ubspectrum.com
Monday, October 17, 2011
WANTED: Landlords on Lisbon AKARI IBURI Senior Life Editor
For two weeks, UB political science students Bill Pike, Jeremy Ferris and Mike Frodyma lived without running water. They kept a plastic tub of water next to the sink and used it for washing dishes, flushing toilets, and scrubbing the floors. “We had to flush our toilets somehow,” said Frodyma, a sophomore political science major.
“They were just walking around and looking around like, ‘Oh wow, this looks pretty awful,’” Pike said.
On April 27, The Spectrum printed a report showing that within an eight-block radius of The University Heights, 75 landlords rent properties with hundreds of violations. Lisbon Avenue is one of the streets included in the report. The Spectrum began investigating last year after four houses rented by UB students in the Heights caught fire within eight months. All of the residences that caught fire had faulty wiring or natural gas problems, according to Off Campus Student Relations.
‘Emergency Powers Council’ Can ‘Circumvent’ SA Senate SARA DINATALE Asst. News Editor In the summer, three students have the power to make decisions on behalf of the entire UB undergraduate population. They make up the Student Association’s Emergency Powers Council. The Emergency Powers Council (EPC) exists as an extension of the SA Senate, able to convene in its place. It consists of the SA president, vice president, treasurer, chairman of the SA Senate, and speaker of the SA Assembly. It takes three EPC members to call a meeting in the summer and four to call one during the school year.
The EPC was originally conceived to function during the summer, when many of the SA senators are not in Buffalo, according to Gibbons. But an EPC meeting can be called “whenever any member of the [EPC] deems such a meeting necessary,” according to SA’s constitution. SA Treasurer Sikander Khan believes the EPC is a “practical solution to getting things done when people are not around [in the summer],” but he acknowledges that the use of the council has been “abused in the past.”
“I’ve talked to many students, and they don’t like how SA has the power to go into these EPC meetings and circumvent the legislative process,” Gibbons said.
The EPC had one meeting each year in 2006, 2008 and 2009. These all took place in the summer recess when there is no standing Senate. In 2007, the EPC didn’t meet at all. However, in the 2010-11 school year, seven EPC meetings were held. Three of them took place in a time frame in which the Senate could have or did meet. These numbers were determined based on EPC meeting minutes obtained from SA by The Spectrum.
The EPC can enact legislation and approve budgetary line transfers and appointments.
“I know last year…they approved all of the SA staff bonuses during the holiday season,” Gibbons said. “They
SA Senator James Gibbons, a senior political science major, is concerned that the EPC may hold too much power.
On Saturday, Oct. 8, Daniel Ryan, UB’s director of off campus student relations, and a group of house inspectors, knocked on the students’ rusty Lisbon Avenue door. They condemned the house almost immediately.
This was not a science experiment. The students were the victims of the kind of absentee landlord that plagues the University Heights and makes the area around South Campus among the worst in Buffalo to live, according to home inspectors.
Students living at 28 Lisbon Ave. were forced to leave their house after the deplorable living conditions resulted in the house being condemned. Meg Kinsley /// The Spectrum
begun to crack down on violations and have started doing housing blitzes, in which they do surprise inspections.
Since April, housing inspectors, in conjunction with the university, have
Walls were caved in with holes stretching over a foot in diameter. Insulation spewed out of the ceiling and walls, floors were unfinished, toilets were rusty and the place smelled of must and mildew. The next day, the students and their grey and white cat Marmel were homeless. Ryan arranged a hotel for the first night and then the group found its new home on Heath St. Ryan says that students should be more proactive when dealing with unlivable circumstances. But Pike and his roommates said that until the water stopped, they didn’t really mind the living conditions because they hadn’t paid rent in three months.
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On Chris Collins, the UB Foundation, and Truth LUKE HAMMILL Senior News Editor If you’ve been following The Spectrum lately, you know that last week, I reported on an apparent illegal $2,560 political contribution from the UB Foundation (UBF) to Erie County Executive Chris Collins’s reelection campaign. UB officials described the donation as an “honest mistake,” and the day after our initial story was published, a Collins official said the money was returned. The payment was made by The Center for Industrial Effectiveness (TCIE, the “business arm of UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences”), which uses the UB Foundation as its accountant (hence the UB Foundation’s name on the check), according to TCIE Executive Director Tim Leyh. Leyh said that when he bought tickets for his staff to attend breakfast and dinner events honoring Chris Collins, he didn’t realize it would be viewed as a political contribution. He also said the TCIE raises its own revenue by providing business services to local organizations, and to “develop clients,” the TCIE staff engages in networking activities at local community events – the Collins events being examples. (Both Leyh and university spokesman John Della Contrada refused to provide the names and dates of the Collins events and declined to say exactly who attended them. Personally, I’d also like to know how you’d pay $2,560 for breakfast and dinner
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Being a Queen Isn’t a Drag KEREN BARUCH Asst. Life Editor Dante Williams and Tony Coby stare into the mirror: the reflections staring back at them are of a 6-foot-tall black man and a bald Jewish man. They both know that in about two hours the reflections looking back at them will be of beautiful and voluptuous women. Using dark shades to create new cheekbones and tiny colored pencils to draw eyebrows, the pair uses TV makeup to transform from men to drag queens. Williams and Coby, now transformed into their drag personas of Monica St. James and Penny Tration, are now ready to entertain. In contrast to what many people believe about being a drag queen, it is in fact a lot of work. Beneath the colorful and funky exterior is an outrageous and difficult theatrical art form. These women are professional drag queens at The Cabaret, Tration’s drag queen show bar in Cincinnati, which is one of only four venues in the country that hold drag shows four nights a week. St. James and Tration grew up in a ‘drag area,’ according to St. James. Although they never expected to enter the drag career, life experiences paved their way to becoming queens, and that road took them to The Cabaret. “When I was 7 or 8 years old I always waited up until my family fell asleep [before I dressed up as
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Professional drag queens Monica St. James & Penny Tration prepare themselves for their transformations.
Meg Kinsley /// The Spectrum
Bad Weather Doesn’t Stop Buffalo Occupiers LUKE HAMMILL Senior News Editor The Occupy Buffalo movement’s chant couldn’t have been any more appropriate on Saturday. “Through rain, through snow, Oc-cu-py, Buf-fa-lo!” shouted over 100 people gathered in Downtown Buffalo’s Niagara Square on a brutal day of weather – wind, hail, rain, and cold – as drivers honked their horns in support on their way past. “Occupy Buffalo” is Buffalo’s arm of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17. Both movements are still going strong. “The weather’s been the only obstacle, really,” said Robert Albini, 31, of Amherst, an Occupy Buffalo organizer who has been living in Niagara Square for over a week now.
Occupy Buffalo is all-inclusive; the movement does not endorse any one political or economic ideology. There are no official leaders, and there are no official demands as of yet. Many pundits have criticized the protesters for being unfocused. “It’s not about making demands yet,” Albini said. “There’s so many issues that if we just attack one issue specifically, it could be satisfied, and then we lose momentum. Right now, it’s more of an organizing process; we’re just trying to get everybody on the same page to find out what everybody’s issues are, and then we’re going to go from there.” To do that, Buffalo occupiers hold “General Assembly” meetings each Saturday at noon in Niagara Square. The meetings adhere to a “consensus-driven” decision-making process – an ultra-democratic, anyone-can-speak method that requires everyone to agree on a “proposal” before it is passed. If a proposal is “blocked” by even one person, it fails. The meetings also have a unifying code of conduct.
I N S I D E
Hundreds of people gathered in the harsh weather conditions to protest and “occupy” Buffalo on Saturday afternoon. Meg Kinsley /// The Spectrum
Weather for the Week: Monday: Partly Cloudy/Wind- H: 60, L: 46 Tuesday: Showers- H: 55, L: 49 Wednesday: Rain- H: 53, L: 43
But as winter inches closer, the movement grows larger. It has now spread worldwide; similar protests have organized in over 1,000 cities and over 78 countries. The occupiers are largely unified by their
“We are the 99 percent” slogan and a desire to put an end to what they see as excessive corporate greed and corporate influence on politics.
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