University of Wisconsin student government members heard presentations Monday night on a number of controversial changes occurring in Madison, including the new state Voter ID bill, the Mifflin Street Block Party and a state Senate bill removing municipal limits on landlord conduct.
Associated Students of Madison Legislative Affairs Chair Hannah Somers said UW will be instituting new student IDs to include a signature and a valid expiration date, compensating for the Voter ID law which would have made the IDs an unacceptable form of identification to vote locally.
“This is really good news,” Somers said. “This means we don’t have to lobby the university to change our IDs.”
According to Somers, the dean of students office is working to begin the ID transformation process while ASM debates how to best inform students of the new student IDs.
Somers added ASM found out about the change last Thursday, but said she believes the dean of students office has been working on redeveloping student IDs since the beginning of this academic year. The new student IDs should be available by February, before the next scheduled elections in Madison.
Committee members also discussed the recent Senate Bill 107, which prohibits limits on landlord conduct by municipalities, and which ASM is planning to campaign against throughout the fall. The bill would remove a number of protections put in place by city ordinances pertaining to showings, background checks and refusals of tenancy based on those checks.
Erika Wolf, an advocacy field organizer for the United Council of UW Students, said the Senate bill is a power grab by the state which reverses work to protect potential renters and current tenants from predatory landlords.
“These landlords and folks who rent to young people […] they just see dollar signs,” Wolf said. “They know they can give you a crappy place to live and you can’t do anything about it.”
Wolf added student responses could include asking Madison landlords to sign an ASM agreement stating they will not adopt predatory practices against students and blacklisting those landlords who prey on students in the press.
Other suggestions included collaborating student ratings and accounts of their experiences with various landlords.
The committee also debated an ASM survey that would be sent to students regarding the historic Mifflin Street Block Party, following Mayor Paul Soglin’s proposals to end the party after two stabbings and multiple battery incidents last spring.
The proposed survey would include questions on both the history and safety of the event in an effort to gain student insight to possible proposals by the mayor to change or end the block party.
Somers said the survey will go out to students after the committee schedules a meeting with Soglin and has a better sense of how he feels on the issue. Soglin has not officially announced a proposal to change or end Mifflin.
“This is to find out how much students know about it and to […] get a student perspective on the issue of ending Mifflin,” Somers said. “We’re going to analyze the student responses and come up with a student perspective on the issue, but it’ll all depend on what we hear from the city.”
