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Would you like a free spring break vacation courtesy of your
UCLA student government?
It’s not a joke. UCLA student and former Internal Vice
President of the Undergraduate Student Association Council Elias
Enciso was reimbursed $340 for a trip to Milwaukee, Wis. ““
just for the asking.
The official justification for the expenditure was attendance at
a conference by the student advocacy group, La Familia, which
Enciso attended with with two other people.
For those not familiar, La Familia is meant for gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgender Chicano/as and Latino/as ““ a broad
and inclusive group, as you might imagine.
Motive for the attendance at this National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force-sponsored conference, “Creating Change,” reads
like an example from “Intellectual-babble for Dummies.”
It says in part, “we hope to gain valuable knowledge,
information and networks to bring back to members of (La Familia)
as well as to other students on campus who want to learn more about
how to undermine heterosexism and homophobia.”
Such valuable knowledge was apparently gained in conference
workshops like: “The Growing SM-Leather-Fetish
Movement,” “Poly Wants More Than One Cracker: Polyamory
in a Society Dependent Upon Coupledom,” “Old Queers
Acting Up,” “Unspeakable Joy: An Inside Look at Why
Dancing with Gay-Abandon Continues to be Integral to Gay
Culture,” and the crowning glory, “Drag 101: How to
Turn Kids in Makeup into Kings and Queens.”
A total of $240 in airfare and $100 low-income registration to
send Elias Enciso to a conference extolling, among other things,
the virtues of polyamory, or partner-swapping. This is money well
spent?
The most disturbing aspect of the expenditure is its utter
“normality” within the larger practice of how your
student fees are spent. The far-left slate on USAC, which comically
refers to itself as Student Empowerment! spends your $1.6 million
in annual compulsory fees in this nickel-and-dime manner.
Unfortunately, not enough money is spent in any one spot to raise
important eyebrows, and for most people, even the Daily Bruin News
staff, is too complicated, time-consuming and intimidating to
fight.
Since the radical takeover by Student Entrapment! of predecessor
Students First!, their political machine has continually grown,
adding “student-initiated programs” for the exclusive
benefit of their cronies, and more (always more) appropriations for
an endless variety of ridiculous “educational”
pursuits.
This political coalition mimics the success of 19th-century NYC
machine politics, only it’s not Boss Tweed at the helm,
it’s Boss Lane.
We can’t directly pin this latest outrage on President
Karren Lane, but it was her appointee Terence Cordero, USAC Finance
Committee chairman, who gave the go-ahead. For a student deemed by
“Boss” Lane to deserve a post supervising student
money, Cordero is surprisingly shoddy with numbers. Or more
specifically, he fails to make note of strange discrepancies
perpetrated by professional moochers like Elias Enciso.
The appropriation request and approval for $350 is public record
in the Nov. 13 USAC minutes ““ $200 in airfare and $150 in
registration costs. Documentation for airfare is attached, but
proof that “Creating Change” was charging $150
registration is absent. In contrast, the conference handbook only
notes $100 low-income and $200 regular fees.
When the money was actually spent, airfare had risen $30 to
$239.95, and registration only totaled $100. The effect is that $50
in padding on the actual $100 registration conveniently covered the
$40 increase in airfare.
Enciso and Cordero offer poor explanations for why the $40
overrun just happened to be covered by a $50 overestimation for
another cost.
Cordero would only note that whatever money not spent would be
reabsorbed into the contingency fund. By his rule, the $50
overestimation should have been returned, while airfare remained
$200. But because airfare was $40 more than requested, only $10,
not $50, was returned to the fund. Cordero could have spotted the
$50 overrun if he had demanded proof of the registration fee.
Enciso explained that he asked for $150 under the assumption
that he would not qualify for the $50 fee waiver to the
“low-income” $100 fee. Problem is, the waiver he refers
to is from $200 to $100, not $150 to $100.
When this was explained to him, he could only answer that it
must have been a mistake.
Whether it was a deliberate or genuine blunder is something
we’ll never know ““ but the $50 overestimation covering
the $40 overrun is awfully convenient.
Besides the shady financial aspects of the deal, there were
other questions Enciso refused to answer:
““ How the $340 for the trip helped him to “undermine
heterosexism and homophobia” at UCLA (never mind that
“heterosexism” is a recently invented concept of
debatable validity).
““ Whether a conference featuring swingers, a “Mr.
and Miss Gay Teen Pageant,” and the vital history of gay
dancing was the sort of “important discourse”
emphasized in the “Description of the Program” portion
of the request.
Enciso also refused to say which workshops and sessions he
attended, only noting that in one, “we evaluated the
homophobia at the World Conference on Racism and
homophobia.”
This is what $340 bought at the conference: the
“insight” that hatred toward gays was discussed in a
conference focused on eradicating homophobia itself.
USAC does not have to spend your money this way.
Tell Cordero, who refuses to draw any lines between what is
“educational” and just victimologist drivel, that he is
not merely an impersonal tool of USAC’s financial guidelines
criterion for requests; that in fact, common-sense plays a part in
what sort of requests deserve approval.
Or even better, turn out Student Entrapment! in USAC elections
next quarter and put an end to this campus experiment in slob
rule.