Editorial: What platforms?

On Thursday, Beatriz Anguiano, Bradley Bottoms, Don Gilbert, Kabir Kapur, Joyce Han and Paul Min said farewell to the Senate table as their term ended and their replacements stepped in.

Of these six senators, few accomplished their platforms.

Min helped with the Campus Safety Walk to increase lighting on campus. Bottoms worked on bike safety through Student Housing and the UC Davis Police Department. Kapur helped to “empower student advocacy” through his work with Lobby Corps and voter registration.

But overall, very few senators were able to check off the platforms on their to-do lists.

While fulfilling campaign promises should not be the only measure of success for senators, we do not think it’s unrealistic for us to expect them to accomplish at least some of the platforms that got them into office.

Being unable to accomplish platforms does not necessarily make a senator a bad student leader, but it does make you wonder what they did for a year.

Candidates often run with outlandish platforms that are either impossible or unlikely to be achieved, which are then recycled and reused in subsequent years. For example, adding Unitrans hours, lowering parking fees and creating an ASUCD newsletter have been used many times in the past. While we understand that platforms are created to garner votes, we’d also like to see some realistic platforms achieved.

We’d like to see candidates research their ideas for platforms before running with them in order to make sure they are achievable. It is misleading for candidates to tell students what they can expect if they are elected, only to disappoint them at the end of their term.

This next round of senators and the executive ticket have promised us a whole slew of changes, and we can’t wait to see late-running buses, academic credit for club leaders, an Aggie Reuse textbook program, a new pub in the MU and some other vague things about uniting the campus.

And we’re still waiting on those waffles, former Senator Yani.