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THE DAILY CARDINAL
Residents of a Madison Property Management home on West Washington Avenue say the company failed to attend to a sewage backup in their basement last week. Nate Lustig, a resident of the home, said he and his roommates smelled what they assumed was a dead animal in the furnace in late January. He said they alerted MPM of the situation but the company did not attend to the problem in a timely fashion. Officials from MPM denied mishandling the tenants’ request. Rachel Govin, a corporate counsel representative for MPM, said the residents’ allegations are “false and completely inaccurate.” She said in a phone call to Lustig Feb. 16 she would “take action” if he relayed false information to media outlets. Lustig, 23, said one of his roommates, Mike Bourgeois, 21, first noticed “a really strong” smell Jan. 20.
Lustig, who was out of town at the time, advised Bourgeois to open all the windows and to try to locate the source of the stench. The smell spread to other areas of the house by Jan. 23. “It was in the upstairs kitchen, the downstairs kitchen, a couple of other places. It was bad enough that we had the windows open,” Lustig said. The same day, Lustig said MPM employees showed the house to prospective tenants and his roommate mentioned the smell to an employee. According to an e-mail from Govin, the residents did not follow protocol. She said they are required to report maintenance issues to MPM by either sending an e-mail, calling the office or filling out a maintenance request form. According to Lustig, Shelly, an employee of MPM whose last name is not listed in e-mails, visited the home Feb. 6 for a routine annual sewage page 3
PHOTO COURTESY NATE LUSTIG
Nate Lustig, a resident of the home on West Washington Avenue, said over 50 percent of his basement floor was filled with ‘solids.’
Budget repair bill still leaves looming gap By Charles Brace THE DAILY CARDINAL
JENNY PEEK/THE DAILY CARDINAL
Dist. 8 hopefuls encourage high student turnout By Rachel Holzman THE DAILY CARDINAL
Candidates vying for the District 8 alder position hope to gain student support to continue past Tuesday’s primary. Bryon Eagon, Mark Woulf, Katrina Flores and Jacob Schmidt are all in the running to replace current District 8 Ald. Eli Judge. Flores, 30, is a graduate student at UW-Madison hoping for a strong student turnout. “The biggest thing I’m trying to accomplish is trying to get students to see themselves as part of the Madison community and not just the UW campus community,” Flores said. “I want to try to break the campus bubble and get students out to vote in order to ensure their concerns are being addressed.” Schmidt, 20, a UW-Madison junior, believes this election is important in order for students to have a say in who will ultimately have a major effect on their lives. “A city council member does a
lot of things that will directly affect their day-to-day lives, and students need to make sure they are voting for the person they feel has their best interests in mind,” Schmidt said. Bryon Eagon, 20, a UWMadison junior, is putting student issues at the top of his agenda. “I am passionate about representing student issues and feel like I can turn these ideas into actions,” Eagon said. Woulf, 20, also a UW-Madison junior, has recently criticized police priorities and believes bar raids have become too common. “I want students to know that when they go to the polls they should be looking at the issues most pertinent to them and vote based on that,” Woulf said. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sellery, Witte and Lucky residents’ voting location is Gordon Commons. Chadbourne, Barnard, Elizabeth Waters, Tripp and Adams residents can vote at Memorial Union.
Obama changes the way whites, blacks view each other, according to researchers By Estephany Escobar THE DAILY CARDINAL
UW-Madison and Florida State psychology professors released results of their new research study revealing President Obama’s influence in the way whites perceive blacks. Patricia Devine, a UW-Madison psychology professor, and E. Ashby Plant, a Florida State psychology professor, conducted the study. According to a University Communications release, the professors found a decrease in racial prejudice following Obama’s nomination. The research showed 51 percent of the participants showed knee-jerk preferences for whites, a decrease in bias from previous years. In an interview, Plant said the topic interested her and Devine because previous research suggested exposing people to positive role models of different groups could have a positive impact. “Barack Obama was a very posi-
tive, very counter-stereotypic AfricanAmerican man, constantly in the news, very salient.” Plant said. “[We thought] that this may truly have an impact on people’s attitudes to African-Americans in general.” According to the release, UWMadison and Florida State non-black students participated in a variety of experiments to “measure stereotyping and implicit prejudice.” Plant said the study focused on questioning students about the positive ideas that came to their mind when thinking about African-Americans. “We saw if they listed Barack Obama, if they listed [him as] the first thing that came to their mind … We found that if they did they also had far less prejudice,” Plant said. Alimatu Sirleaf, a member of the Multicultural Student Coalition, said she was not surprised research participants associated positive African-American figures with
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Residents accuse MPM of ignoring sewage leak By Erin Banco
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Obama during the study. “There were a lot of students that were in support of President Obama, and I did see that very much on the night he was elected. Everybody was out and in support of him,” Sirleaf said.
However, Sirleaf said she did not think interactions between blacks and whites changed since last fall. The research findings are currently under review, and researchers expect to publish the results within the next nine months.
LORENZO ZEMELLA/CARDINAL FILE PHOTO
Barack Obama accepts the Democratic presidential nomination. Researchers say racial prejudice decreased after the nomination.
Despite a projected $5.7 billion state deficit in the next fiscal year, lawmakers Monday unveiled a plan to decrease the over $600 million current deficit that still needs to be solved by June 30. The proposal does not solve this year’s deficit, but reduces it by $183 million, according to analysis by the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau. The proposal does not mention cuts to the UW System, meaning any reductions will be announced in the larger budget package Gov. Jim Doyle will unveil Tuesday. According to Andrew Reschovsky, a public affairs and applied economics professor at UW-Madison, lawmakers tried fixing this fiscal year’s shortfall earlier in the year, but the underperforming economy continues to reduce tax revenues. He said a repair bill is more difficult to create now than earlier in the fiscal period. “Cutting spending in the last two months is particularly difficult,” he said. “You can’t tell people ‘sorry, you have to pay higher tuition for the months of March and April’ or tell a teaching assistant ‘you’re fired’ halfway through the semester.” Under state law, Wisconsin must maintain a $65 million “rainy day” fund in case of financial emergencies. The proposal shown today eliminates the statute for this year. Reschovsky said many states use similar financial maneuvering in tough economic times and said while a “rainy day” fund is smart policy in a strong economy, the current crisis likely forced lawmakers to eliminate the provision to not raise taxes by $65 million. He said states with large rainy day funds, upward of $1.4 billion, were still not able to stop the fiscal downturns in 2002 to 2004 and the looming national economic crisis is substantially larger than that episode. Lawmakers and residents could only speculate Monday on what they hope is in Doyle’s larger bill. State Assembly Majority Leader Tom Nelson, DKaukauna, said he is hopeful Doyle will present a budget that prioritizes state infrastructure, fire services and police but that still recognizes “families are cutting their budgets, and we’re going to be cutting our budgets, too.” State Rep. Phil Montgomery, R-Green Bay, said Doyle’s proposal Tuesday would be full of tax increases and Doyle needs to “take responsibility for getting us into this mess.” —Caitlin Gath contributed to this report
“…the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”