If you haven't noticed, our college town is changing. With multiple student housing projects in the works, the East Campus development project promising to bring a plethora of new businesses to the area and the Metro's Purple Line plan cutting straight through the campus, College Park is on the verge of a huge transformation, one that will revamp the way we - and everyone else who visits our town - view the municipal home of our university.
And tomorrow, we will elect the people who will help shape many of the decisions on how that change will be incorporated into the town we already know and love; tomorrow is the day of the College Park City Council elections.
No matter what you think of the council members - whether you think they are incompetent or that they are irrelevant bodies in the grand scheme of your college experience - they are the people who will nonetheless be making major decisions on issues you will not be able to avoid. No longer can you count on living on the campus for all four years of college, in but insulated from College Park. Eventually, you will be subject to housing options that are subject to the city council. No longer can students disregard how city officials deal with policing the city. Students are continually the targets of criminals who operate in the city, and that's not something that's likely to change. No longer should students accept the dearth of businesses in College Park, where Wawa can no longer serve as a grocery-store stand-in and Rugged Warehouse stands as the only - and homely - clothing option. No longer can students allow themselves to have no say in how the city council slashes away at parking around their homes, as they did in the Knox Box area.
The point is, students must vote. City council members are only answerable to their voting constituents. In other words, they don't - and don't have to - care about their constituents who don't care about them. We, as students, must care about who sits on the city council and must show that we care by voting, even in districts that are uncontested. As long as students are seen to be lazy, non-voting ingrates who demand action from the city and then turn a blind eye to its leadership dynamics, we will continue to be disregarded.
The Student Government Association has done the legwork to get students to the polls tomorrow. It targeted student groups and registered students so they are now eligible to vote. Then, as we suggested in our Sept. 5 staff editorial, they devised a way to get those registered students to the polls by organizing a campus-to-polling-place bus schedule. They have done their job. Now it is our turn, as students, to live up to our end of the bargain. Doing so means informing yourself on the issues particularly relevant to students, and voting for the candidates who are in line with student desires.
The SGA has compiled information on candidates at www.sga.umd.edu. The Diamondback has endorsed Stacey Baca and Bob Catlin for the city's District 2, and our reasoning for that decision can be found in Thursday's staff editorial ("Baca and Catlin for council," Nov. 1).
Our town is changing in huge ways. Because the incumbent council members in Districts 3 and 4 are not being challenged, the city council will be changing less so. But even though many of the bodies will remain the same, their thoughts on how much they need to represent the desires of their student constituents can change. The more students who vote, the more likely that change becomes. A change in the volume of the student voice will cause a change among the same old council members.
The winds of change are blowing. How much students will affect the direction in which that wind will blow will largely be determined tomorrow. Look at voting tomorrow as staking your claim in city politics. It is those stakes that may be our only hope for our voices not being blown away in the winds of change, never to be heard.
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