SCENE
Orchesis annual performance showcases student choreography across genres Pg. 5
SPORTS
BSERVED
CWU football coaching staff welcomes new faces and promotes an old one Pg. 6 - 7
The student debt crisis a burden on America’s future Pg. 10
Vol. 125 NO. 4
April 26, 2023
Earth Month Edition
It’s Earth Month: Here is what Ellensburg is doing to become more sustainable Anna Fridell Staff Reporter The city of Ellensburg is engaged in a variety of ways to improve environmental sustainability, according to Mayor of Ellensburg Nancy Lillquist. “There’s the stuff we’ve been doing forever, like energy efficiency rebates and water conservation measures,” Lillquist said. “Solar Park, it’s been around for 20 years, tree city, we’ve been doing that for 40 years.” In 1983, Ellensburg was given the title of Tree City which means that it’s a city that cares about its trees, according to the City of Ellensburg website. Ellensburg was one of the first cities in Washington to earn this title. Lillquist emphasized the importance of education when it comes to improving air quality in the area. “Making sure everyone knows there’s an educational component that the city can help with in terms of making sure people burn clean, dry wood and pay attention to those inversion days," Lillquist said. The primary cause of poor air quality in Ellensburg is due to nearby wildfires, according to Lillquist. “Primarily, the biggest air quality measures we could take would be to make sure our forests don’t burn,” Lillquist said. “The county just got a grant for a whole lot of money to put towards forest health improvement.” The city’s sustainability plan has a major focus on identifying where greenhouse gasses are coming from and providing alternative options to lower emissions, according to Lillquist.
“What I’m hopeful [for] with the sustainability plan is to have a better picture, particularly for climate change, and where our greenhouse gasses are coming from…as far as my understanding right now, mostly transportation,” Lillquist said. A major project the city is working on involves making the switch from gas vehicles to electric within public transportation, according to Lillquist. The city is preparing for this long-term project by installing electric vehicle charging stations for electric or hybrid vehicles at city hall, as well as maintaining these local charging stations, according to Lillquist. “We have a grant that is looking towards how to electrify our bus, so those transit buses; eventually we’d like to make them all electric," Lillquist said. Lillquist has also acted on a flooding project particularly regarding west Ellensburg. The city built Levy Road with the strategy in mind of capturing the water that previously would flood the road. “It goes from Dollarway Road to essentially the freeway [I-90], and that captures a bunch of the water that moves though,” Lillquist said. “We enhanced the bridges to make the bridges bigger across Dollarway Road.” The purpose of this project is to relocate the water to keep it off the main roads, according to Lillquist. “We’ve got to steer the water, but we have to make sure it has plenty of room to kind of spread out and soak in as well,” Lillquist said. “We’re providing a more appropriate floodplain for it than just running along the road, like it has in the past.”
ASCWU candidates share their goals before election See story pg. 2
Presidential Candidates Shyanne Sather (Left) and Malik Cantú (Right). Courtesy of Publicity Center
CWU still seeing low dorm occupancy after COVID Megan Rogers News Editor Residence hall occupancy on the CWU Ellensburg campus towards the end of this academic year is still below administration expectations, impacting staff in both housing and dining. According to records obtained by The Observer, there were 2,054 students living in the residence halls in fall 2021 versus 2,143 in fall 2022. That represents a year-on-year increase of 89 students, but still 1,000 fewer residents than pre-COVID levels, which were around 3,000, according to Tricia Rabel, executive director for Housing and Residence Life. CWU is still not at the expected occupancy that it had hoped to be, according to Joel Klucking, CWU chief financial officer and vice president of finance and administration. “We have lots of available vacancies in our residence halls,” Klucking said. “It’s much healthier if we can get to that 90 to 95% occupied state. That’s where we get the most revenues that are able to be put back into the building systems.” Where the money goes According to Klucking, housing fees coming from students support the operations of both housing and dining. They pay for their cooks, food, resident assistants and all the other employees in housing and dining. If there is money left over at the end of the
year, Klucking said that goes into repairing the buildings. Because there are fewer student housing fees coming in, Rabel said that CWU housing had to leave positions vacant and not hire new people. “We’ve looked at that staffing and decided that [is] the right amount of people to bring back,” Rabel said. “We don’t have as many RA’s [Resident Assistants] as we used to because we don’t have as many students as we used to.” With fewer students on campus, there is also less funding going into utilities, insurance and maintenance, so Rabel said housing has to be very careful about how they use their funds. According to Rabel, Kamola, Sue Lombard, Barto, Wendell Hill A and B, and Dugmore residence halls are all bonded, and the mortgages are still being paid into. “When we have less students to pay into that base, our mortgage doesn’t go down,” Rabel said. “We still have all the same amount of square footage on campus. But we don’t have as many students that are paying.” Rabel said they also had to cut their programming and travel budget. “We haven’t been sending professional staff to conferences or to train to help them better themselves and better the way they serve students,” Rabel said. According to Rabel, the hope is that these effects are short-term and that they will be able to build traveling back into their budget in the future.
2,907 2,054
2,143
2021
2022
Residence occupancy numbers per year. Illustration by Brandon Davis
1,068 Fall
2019
2020