ASUI Election 2023 candidate profiles

Leggett has found an issue with the lack of notable resolutions. Most of the ones seen over the past year have been more reactionary and unsubstantial.

“It has a reputation for pushing extremely opinionated policies,” Leggett said. “The ASUI senate needs a wake-up call: a zap by the spirit of courage and zeal.”

Leggett hopes, if he is elected, that ASUI can become a medium for students to be able to lobby both the school and senate on important topics.

“The only way for the senate to attain this authority is by following precedent, procedure and sound governing philosophies,” Leggett said.

Jared Sherman be installed throughout campus to allow for students in a potentially unsafe situation to request immediate help at a location that is near to them.

Former ASUI senator Jared Sherman is once again throwing his hat into the ring to continue his work last semester.

Sherman, a junior studying human resource management and a member of Greek life, hopes to bridge the gap between those living in Greek houses and those living in the dorms.

For sustainability, Zuercher says that she will work to further the efforts to bring recycling to residential areas on campus as well as strive to make trash cans easily accessible on all areas of the campus.

To address lacking community involvement, Zuercher says that she will work to create more events on campus that will allow the community to get involved and ultimately strengthen the bond between the university and the population of Moscow.

Emma Johnston Emma Johnston is a criminology and psychology major from Merced, California. With prior experience as a senator for ASUI, Johnston is centering Vandal pride in her campaign.

To address Vandal pride, Johnston is looking to offer students more incentives to attend sporting events as well as additional opportunities for students to connect through outdoor activities.

Tanner McClain and Peyton Loffer

Looking to prioritize the Vandal Family, Tanner McClain is rerunning for president of ASUI again with his former Chief of Staff Peyton Loffer as his vice presidential candidate.

With his current VP, Madison Fitzgerald, looking to be involved in other things on campus, McClain looked for someone that could fill that space going into the fall semester.

“(Loffer) was automatically the first person I could think of, after Madison, (to run) together because she was my chief of staff last semester, and she did an incredible job in running the cabinet,” McClain said.

McClain’s goal is to get students more involved as they are working on a module on Canvas to serve as a personality test about the clubs and organizations at the University of Idaho.

McClain hopes also to find a way to bridge the gap between the types of organizations at UI.

“Coming up here, I saw just such a divide between many groups on campus and everyone was doing their own thing,” McClain said. “After hosting things such as winter social, where we had all these groups I mentioned, hosted carnival hallway together that would help bring them together.”

One objective that McClain is focused on is making a change in the Idaho Legislature regarding legalizing fentanyl testing strips in Idaho.

“At the state capital level, these tests of strips are currently illegal in the state of Idaho and are considered paraphernalia,” McClain said. “Students don’t have access to these test strips which are a low-cost method that prevents drug overdoses.”

This effort to push the legislature to recognize student issues is another facet that McClain has been working on and hopes to push further into the next semester.

Idaho Student Association is a coalition of student presidents of universities and colleges in Idaho that aims to elevate student voices.

McClain said that the Idaho State

Board of Education would formally recognize the ISA next year, and the group is making efforts to aid North Idaho College.

“I plan to introduce a resolution… to help fight against the current state of North Idaho College where there’s a possibility of them losing their accreditation,” McClain said. “That’s one thing where the ISA (being a) recognized body (can show) a strong and united (front), and we will be able to push back successfully against those efforts.”

Overall, McClain is excited to have another year to continue the projects he has worked on this past year.

“I deeply care about my work, and I show up to campus every day. I come to my office every day to make the campus a better place and help get more students engaged,” McClain said. “And as always, Go Vandals!”

Hayden Cassinelli

Hayden Cassinelli, a freshman studying finance, is running for a seat in the ASUI Senate. One of the platforms that Cassinelli looks to accomplish is mending the relationship between those living in the dorms and those choosing to live in Greek houses.

Looking at the current senate, Cassinelli said that he is impressed by the work that has been done with, at some points, very few senators. However, when it comes to ASUI, discussing politics has been an issue.

“I hope to bring a different perspective to the senate and counter this,” Cassinelli said. “While it might lose me votes, I’m not ashamed to say that I am a conservative and a Christian and will be voting as such on political matters.”

Mason Stampfli

Driven to improve the lives of students attending UI, Stampfli is running on a multitude of platforms. Improving student turnout, recycling on campus, types of food and infrastructure are some of the many things this candidate hopes to bring to ASUI.

One aspect of student life that Stampfli focused on is Greek life and the need to have events that regenerate the spirit of the Greek community. He hopes to do more events based on myth and the history of Greek life.

Jimmy Leggett

Jimmy Leggett is a junior studying English hoping to leave UI in a better shape than when he first arrived.

Looking at the current state of the ASUI,

“I really hope to continue working on projects such as the events of the ThankA-Thon, that connects our donors to our students,” Sherman said. “Hopefully increasing the amount of scholarships we have available to students, not to mention the better relationship from our students to our alumni.”

Nathaniel Rawlings

A freshman from Nampa, Nathaniel Rawlings is currently studying global disease ecology.

Rawlings is hoping to work on connecting Greek life with the rest of the student body.

He will work on “making the organizations more approachable to those unfamiliar with the formal and informal recruitment, and the Greek system as a whole,” Rawlings said. “It could also encourage unaffiliated, general students on campus to participate in Greek philanthropy events.”

Using UC Davis as an example of what UI’s recycling program can be more environmentally sustainable campus.

“The university generally is clean, but could always be a little cleaner,” Rawlings said. “Implementing such programs would make the university easier on the eyes and the environment.”

Alexandra Gomez

Alexandra Gomez is a junior anthropology major from Fruitland, Idaho. In a statement, Gomez said that her primary goal is to ensure that the UI campus provides a safe and welcoming environment for both current and incoming students.

Gomez said she is also looking to change student involvement on campus to better allow the university to feel more like a “second home.”

Anya Zuercher

Anya Zuercher is a freshman from Twin Falls, Idaho. Her platform consists of five key issues: mental health support, student involvement, campus safety, sustainability and community involvement.

To address mental health support, Zuercher said that she will “push for increased funding for mental health resources on campus.”

In terms of her broad goals, Zuercher says that she will work to allow students to have a say in ASUI decisions.

As a solution to her concerns on campus safety, Zuercher suggests that “safe buttons”

On-campus dining is an additional concern for Johnston, who hopes to work directly alongside Idaho Eats to bring healthy and diverse eating alternatives to campus.

Luella Smith

A transfer student from Boise State University, Smith firstly acknowledged that “everyone makes mistakes.” Using this background, however, Smith hopes to create more events designed for transfer students specifically by focusing on the shared unfamiliarity of a new campus environment. Having worked previously to implement harm-reduction measures on college campuses, Smith highlighted Narcan, a spray used to reverse the effects of opioid overdose, as a significant contributor to harm-reduction efforts.

Mo Jabril

Mo Jabril is a freshman civil engineering major from Boise, Idaho and a member of Greek life.

Looking to keep an ear to the ground for students, Jabril said that he wishes to make the needs of the student body heard and has proposed providing students with up-to-date information on the campus housing spaces whenever available as one way to make this possible.

Nikhil Gill

Nikhil Gill is a sophomore medical sciences major from Gurdaspur, Punjab, India.

An international student himself, Gill is hoping to provide UI’s international students with a representative who can voice their concerns. To help create an inclusive campus environment, Gill said that he is looking to improve ASUI’s outreach to international and minority students to allow them to play a bigger role in the decisions that ASUI makes.

More generally, Gill said that he believes “cross-cultural experiences” are integral to making a college experience that best it can be. To accomplish this, Gill hopes to start by “building bridges” among the multitude of groups on campus to bring about an environment that “celebrates diversity.”

First-year guarantee limits upperclassmen’s housing options

Software and space allotments have limited students’ ability to secure on-campus rooms

Katie Hettinga ARGONAUT

Returning students seeking on-campus housing may be waitlisted as a result of a large incoming freshman class taking priority.

Housing and Residence Life has set aside a larger-than-usual block of rooms for first-year students due to continued growth in projected freshmen enrollment, according to John Kosh, the communications director for university Auxiliary Services.

A guarantee that all freshmen will have on-campus dorms means there would be less availability for students returning to on-campus housing.

Hannah, a student in her first semester at University of Idaho, who asked for her last name not to be used, chose to live on campus again next semester for convenience. Now on a waiting list, she feels discouraged.

“It’s kind of gross. It’s kind of immoral. It’s scary to be a student, especially if you’re not from town,” she said on the decision to prioritize freshmen over upperclassmen.

Hannah said she received one initial email from Housing and Residence Life after she joined the housing waitlist. To her knowledge, she has not received further communication.

“I wish they pressed this problem a little bit more. I wish it was kind of a bigger deal to let us know,” Hannah said. “I feel kind of neglected because if I was in charge, I would be shoving this information down my students’ throats.”

Valentine Piere is another freshman planning to live on campus next year. They understand that freshmen are required to live on campus, but are nonetheless frustrated.

“It just sucks that (Housing is not) being accommodating towards other people as well,” Piere said. “(UI) honestly should just be taking in less freshmen if they can’t handle it. Nothing against freshmen, but the school could be making smarter choices.”

Like many students who live on campus, Piere benefited from the campus’ convenience and accessibility.

“I think there’s a lot of support built into being on campus,” said one RA, who asked not to be named due to Housing policy for giving interviews. “There’s (academic peer mentors), there’s just a lot of accessible support and resources available.”

Both Pierre and the RA secured rooms for next semester, but they each still had issues with the housing portal.

After logging on at 9 a.m. sharp on March 21, right when the housing portal opened, both students had to continually refresh the page until the bandwidth issue was mitigated and they could reserve rooms.

Even when they gained access to the portal, housing availability was limited.

“I was originally going to try to go to the LLCs, but that didn’t even show up as an option for me,” Piere said. Instead, they reserved a room in McConnell.

The resident assistant expressed concerns about people who were planning to renew rooms that are now blocked out for first-year use.

For some halls “you can’t renew because to renew means you’re stuck in a freshmen building,” the RA said. “You can’t do that. So you’re forced out of your room, but then you can’t find another room, because they all fill up too fast.”

Dean Kahler, the vice provost for Strategic Enrollment Management, attributes the increase in enrollment to campus-wide efforts.

“The colleges are all in, the auxiliary areas are all in – everybody on this campus,” Kahler said. “Everybody is on board with ‘we need to grow our enrollment.’ I think that team effort is important.”

Kahler said he has heard some concerns from returning students and their parents.

“The university is here to help them and we’re going to do everything we can,” Kahler said. “I think there’s going to have to be conversations with off-campus folks about, ‘what are the options?’ And ‘can we partner as a town-gown community even better to help serve those students?’”

Kahler expressed interest in working with other campus units, including ASUI, to provide information to students about resources available.

Kahler also mentioned that another housing option is the UI Greek system with availability in fraternities and sororities.

ASUI President Tanner McClain echoed this option.

“I went talking with presidents of IFC and Panhellenic and they had talked about this as well,” McClain said. “We need students to come over here because they are struggling on getting students to live in their chapters and to join Greek Life.”

He added that this is not the solution to figuring out the housing overflow, but that the university would need to build more housing, which will take time.

McClain has experience living in Targhee Hall when it was a dorm for students who tested positive for COVID-19. He said that having to live somewhere he wasn’t planning on living was hard.

“Especially for being a first-year college student getting away from home for the first time,” McClain said. “That’s an uncomfortable situation to be in, and we want to ensure students aren’t put in that situation.”

While freshmen can count on having dorms available to them, returning students may need to seek out alternative options.

Abortion Laws

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“(Housing will) encourage them to stay on the waiting list even while they’re exploring other options,” Kosh said. “We will refund deposits. If you go on a waiting list, though I know we used to be nonrefundable, you will be refunded.”

A large volume of students tried to reserve a room at the same time, too many for the portal’s bandwidth to handle.

“There’s a technical issue, fixed within hours, but then there was something assigned as a technical issue but it was not,” Kosh said. “It was just an actual logistics issue.”

With this resolved, any upperclassmen unable to reserve a room in not a technical issue, but housing being prioritized for freshmen. Living in the residence halls is a valuable experience for first-year students according to Alex Call, a senior resident assistant who has lived on campus for four years.

Expanding current bed spaces and finding overflow housing are both short-term solutions, Kosh said.

Kosh said UI is exploring building plans to utilize property around the VandalStore as an opportunity for a combined retail and residential space. This type of housing would not only benefit undergraduate students, but also professional students, as they can and keep things from going to the landfill,” Dawson said. university employees and visiting faculty. In the face of a difficult situation, Kosh commended Auxiliary Services’ staff.

“(They) are doing an amazing job and they’re working incredibly hard. I don’t want people to think they’re heartless,” Kosh said. “They are making hard decisions, but they’re doing it with a great deal of thought.”

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“We know that patients are being asked to travel pretty far outside of their community, and we don’t believe that patients should have to do that,” Dixit said. “They should be able to access the care that they need in the community that they live in.”

Dixit said that making patients travel further to access services like reproductive health care forces members of the community out. These types of legislation also affect the quality of care people will receive due to a multitude of factors.

“We know that when there are restrictive bans and stipulations on the health care people can receive that people’s health are not being elevated,” Dixit said. “Patients having to travel super far or just opt out of care and hope that they can manage the situation from home is likely what we’ll see.”

The consequences of this legislation will continue to grow beyond just the issue of transportation.

“We know that there’s a lot more wrapped up whenever a state pushes for abortion bans, or gender affirming care bans, and it has a larger impact on just healthcare in general,” Dixit said. “We know it will have an impact on maternal health rates. We know that it has disproportionate impact on patients based on whether they live in an urban or rural area, whether they are a person of color, have preexisting conditions, based on their income or access to transportation.”

Dixit also talked about fear of the consequences that providers face when having to balance restrictions placed by the legislature.

“We’ve seen with states like Texas, people could be experiencing a miscarriage and the providers have to consult with lawyers before being able to intervene and help a patient out,” Dixit said.

“I imagine that in Idaho, we’ll see something similar where hospitals and providers will have to figure out how do we provide this care for patients in need, while also balancing politics and the lawyers being involved.”

“That’s the big piece. Glass is not accepted in single stream,” she said. “Largely because glass, when it breaks down, can get so small and granular that it’s almost impossible to separate out from the other components.”

The program is purposefully relaunching on a small scale. Indoor recycling at the ISUB and Pitman will be easier to manage starting off. Signs by each bin will hopefully deter students from “wishful recycling.”

“It’s people that have good intentions, and they just want to be able to recycle as much

The campus needs to understand contamination for the program to remain, making education a key step in the process. The current contractor requires contamination to remain under 5%, according to Wiebe, contrasting with 2018’s 80%-90% contamination rates on campus.

Some of the largest culprits for contamination include paper coffee cups, used paper plates and pizza boxes. So, Wiebe said, when in doubt, throw it out. Dawson has lived in several states, including Utah, where nearly everything seemed recyclable. In contrast, Moscow is relatively isolated and has been more of a challenge than she anticipated.

“Our trash, for instance, goes over 200 miles one way to get to a landfill, which is shocking to me,” she said. “Every other place… there’s a landfill or an incinerator within a few miles.” Dawson was also surprised to find that the town doesn’t recycle glass. “Glass that we take to the recycling center in Moscow is just ground up and turned into an aggregate that’s put on the ground,” Dawson said.

“Basically, it’s not actually recycled. I hadn’t experienced that elsewhere.”

For the future, Wiebe and Dawson are hoping to implement a number of sustainability projects across campus. Ideas include recycling in staff offices, collecting glass to recycle out of town and implementing a composting program.

Composting on campus was a small-scale project back in 2020. Food waste from dining and the cafeteria’s kitchen was often collected by bike and heavily reliant on volunteers. The program was short-lived due to contamination of plastic and bones as well as a poor location, according to Wiebe.

To bring composting back, Dawson hopes to obtain a grant for a biodigester to