Daily Lobo new mexico
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The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
Campaign for decrimilizing pot registers new voters DecrimNM gets pledges from students to vote for lower penalties for pot By Jonathan Baca
Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day, and volunteers were on campus, registering new voters and campaigning for the decriminalization of marijuana. DecrimNM, an organization affiliated with ProgressNow New Mexico and the Drug Policy Alliance, registered more than 100 new voters at the Duck Pond, said campaign worker and recent graduate Rachael Maestas. The group also received around 300 pledges from students to vote for the advisory question to decrease penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana to a $25 fine. “Now that it is officially on the ballot, we are here in full force to get the vote out and really empower student voters specifically,” Maestas said. What made it onto the ballot is a nonbinding advisory question, meaning that the results of the election will not be enough to change the law. Rather it will send a message to elected officials, letting them know what the people of Bernalillo County want, Maestas said. “We’ve never hidden that fact,” she said. “We know it’s an advisory question, and if people are asking for more information, we tell them
William Aranda / Daily Lobo / @_WilliamAranda
Scott Tillman, left, shows UNM sophomore Sean Cobb, right, the vote pledges to sign Tuesday afternoon for the campaign held near the Duck Pond to decriminalize marijuana in Bernalillo County. DecrimNM will be on campus today and tomorrow.
that this is just a suggestion to our elected officials, and will set the stage for what’s going to happen in this state in the future,” Patrick Davis is executive director of ProgressNow New
Mexico, the group that initiated the original petition to get the question on the ballot. He was on campus all day helping to register voters and sign up volunteers for the campaign.
Davis said despite the political battles and legal wrangling around the issue, the campaign has never been stronger. “This has been like the ballot initiative that won’t die. It’s sort of
Fine Arts proposing tuition increase By Matthew Reisen
The College of Fine Arts is struggling to fund its programs and may be looking to students for help. Kymberly Pinder, dean at the College of Fine Arts, is promoting a universal fee for the arts to help foster growth within the program and University as a whole. An “arts and culture fee” would go a long way to helping with necessary repairs and keeping quality staff at UNM, she said. Pinder’s proposed $40 tuition raise would have gone to the College of Fine Arts annually, to address some of the problems facing the department. The Board of Regents voted against the raise when Pinder presented it in March. The members of the board said asking student to shoulder the budget problems was not a sustainable solution. “It is our job to think outside of the box to fix the problem,” Regent Suzanne Quillen said during the meeting. But Pinder said she’s not giving up on the idea and is creating a comprehensive strategy so that she can present the proposal again in the future. She said departmentspecific support from the student body is nothing new. “The same way that there is a blanket fee for supporting athletics, we would like to have one for
the college of fine arts,” she said. The College of Fine Arts has had funding problems for a few years now, and it has fallen to the administrators within the College to find solutions.There had an allocated equipment budget, but it was cut when the economy crashed and
has yet to be reinstated. Finding money for equipment purchases is now relegated largely to fundraising, she said. But even with generous donations coming from outside sources, more needs to be done to address the many issues Fine Arts is facing.
About $100,000 was recently allocated to the sculpture lab for new HVAC systems, but the building itself needs to be replaced, she said. It has been on the 10-year plan for renovation for about 30 years now,
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been a zombie ballot initiative,” he said. “We got all the signatures and then the city messed it up. Then the city council passed it and the
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Voter page 2
New Mexico newspapers go digital Third grant to fund digitizing newspaper project By Marielle Dent
Diana Cervantes / Daily Lobo / @DailyLobo
Delipidated equipment is spread throughout the Fine Arts metal shop on Tuesday morning. The equipment is just one of the issues affecting the Fine Arts Department and its students.
The College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences and the Center for Southwest Research have received a $220,000 grant to digitize 100,000 New Mexico newspaper pages. The project is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, which is working to create a national searchable database of historically significant U.S. newspapers published between 1836 and 1922, said Paula Wasley, public affairs specialist at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The database is available at the Library of Congress website, Chronicling America. Kathlene Ferris, CSWR digital programs manager, said this is the third newspaper digitization grant to be awarded to the library by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The newly digitized
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Digitized page 3