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10 candidates vying for SG president spot

Tickets present platforms as students vote today, tomorrow

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Published: Monday, March 1, 2004

Updated: Saturday, November 29, 2008

With the largest Student Government presidential candidate field in five years, platforms range from the ambitious to the absurd.

But the 10 candidates said they aren't worried about the votes being split.

Books Not Bombs candidate Brent Perdue opposes the planned bid on Los Alamos Labora-tory, wants better wages and working conditions for UT shuttle bus drivers and wants to lower tuition rates for students.

He said the University shouldn't create barriers if it wants a more diverse student body.

Patrick George of the Reprezent ticket said that if elected, he can bring more student support back to SG by addressing the issues students say they're concerned about.

"Voter turnout shows the lack of support for Student Government," George said.

George's platform includes "promoting cultural awareness" for a more diverse campus, opposing tuition deregulation and standardizing tuition across colleges, creating better bus driver rates and benefits and increasing student parking.

Focus candidate Brent Chaney said he opposes tuition deregulation and has been fighting against it since it was being considered at the state Legislature.

"Our campaign manager, Dan Paschal, led the student charge against deregulation," Chaney said.

The Focus platform also includes getting seniors early football tickets, capping top 10-percent students to 50 percent or 60 percent and getting a student representative on the UT System Board of Regents.

Bears Can't Vote candidate Josh Hug, who ran last year, said he is not worried about the number of candidates splitting the votes, because some students will vote randomly.

Hug's platform includes replacing the two statues on the West Mall with "those two dog statues from Ghostbusters" and creating a dozen outdoor pools that will also be turtle ponds, because turtles will bring more diversity to the University.

Candidate Tom LaGatta for Disenfranchise said there are many similarities between Focus and the current SG president Brian Haley's party, Students First.

"They're like the exact same party," said LaGatta, who also ran for president last year. "Everyone who was in Students First is in Focus now. That's weird to me."

But Brent Chaney said his party is a mixture of new and old parties - some students from Envision and some from Students First.

LaGatta proposes he will divert resources from the "increasingly useless" College of Liberal Arts to a factory that produces miniature toilets for placement inside larger toilets. LaGatta's platform also includes the following: forbidding the melding of men and machines on campus for the next 100 years and setting tuition rates inversely proportionate to a student's I.Q.

Lisa Quinn for Project said diversity can be addressed by dividing different ethnicities into different buildings.

"This way, it's very easy to see exactly how diverse UT is," Quinn wrote in an e-mail. "Just count the number of buildings."

Enervate candidate Lilana Wofsey proposes haunting the Board of Regents members until they cease deregulation and promoting diversity by admitting more of the undead.

Makeout Party, NOTC and Anti-human parties did not offer platforms for publication.

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