This letter is both in response to Gloria Almeida's letter "SA Should Tighten Belt" in the Sept. 20 issue and also in support of the mandatory student activity fee increase, which undergraduate students will be voting on starting Monday.
Almeida calls SA president Burgio's "bigger and better" strategy "rhetoric." Had she actually bothered to carefully analyze the situation in context she would have noticed that the strategy is not rhetoric but reality. The legacy which the present SA executive board is carrying on has brought about a number of positive changes in the way SA operates and has overall made SA bigger and better.
In the same vein, SA's public statements regarding the proposed $10 increase are also the truth. The fee increase will do nothing but maintain services that in the recent past have already suffered from reallocation of funds.
In the end, the $10 increase is also just that, only $10 more per semester. Seeing as a great number of students seem to be able to afford to waste their money on excessive partying, I find it hard to believe that the increase would make much of a difference. One night a semester spent studying instead of drinking oneself silly certainly couldn't hurt. Such a small increase would hardly increase financial difficulties for some students, as UB Biz! Senate candidate Tiffany Chan claimed in the Sept. 24 issue of The Spectrum.
Considering the amount of services students get for the relatively small fee every semester I cannot see an overwhelmingly valid reason for why any student would want to vote against keeping the fee mandatory and raising it by $10. Inflation based fee increases should not even be questioned.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
