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Two students have announced their candidacies for the position of student body president.
William Pomerleau, the incumbent, and Gimbala Sankare, president of the class of 2010, have begun organizing their campaigns for the Dec. 3 vote.
Sankare’s platform focuses on parking issues on campus. “The Campus Planning Committee came up with a campus master plan that involves solving the parking issue,” Sankare, a second-year education major, said. “The issue of parking is not the actual space; it is the locations of the parking lots. One of the plans in the master plan is to move the locations and create more locations on campus for students to be able to park their car.”
Sankare said there is a need to improve the relationships between on-campus and off-campus students. He added that commuter students can “feel a little alienated.” Sankare also said that the BAT bus hours can be problematic for commuter students who have to stay later than it runs.
Pomerleau, a fourth-year history major, said he supports the Zipcar program and would look into providing more funding to get additional cars on campus. The Zipcar program is a new rental-car program on campus.
Pomerleau’s campaign has a focus on Bumstock, which was an annual musical event that had been a University of Maine tradition abolished last year. He plans to bring the program back by spring in a more cost-effective way, saving approximately $35,000 in comparison to previous years.
Both candidates say it is necessary for the student body president to be visible and to listen to constituents. “I feel like I have the student voice,” Sankare said. “It [Student Government] has lost the student voice. There are a lot of things students need and a lot of things that students want but there is a gap between students and student government.”
Pomerleau agreed that the student president has to be as visible as possible, “but you can only do so much,” he said. “There is no way that you can accurately represent everybody all of the time. That’s the thing that is the downside of being a leader.”
“I’m interested to see what Gimbala thinks that he really can do to make himself so much more visible,” Pomerleau said. “I would suggest that it is not possible.”
“I’m stronger than Bill Pomerleau because I will sit with a student no matter who you are and talk to you like somebody I’ve known for years,” Sankare said. “It’s a problem when students don’t know who’s the president of student government. That’s a problem because you are supposed to represent students.”
Sankare is the vice president of the Student Heritage Alliance Center, a Residents on Campus representative for York Hall, a member of the African Student Assoc., Global Links and the Latin American Student Organization.
Pomerleau served as the student body vice president before Priyanth Chandresakar resigned. He is also a member of the National Assoc. of Parliamentarians and a brother of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. It is his experience that is needed in Student Government, according to him.
“I don’t think the university has to put up with another month and a half of people who really haven’t been in Student Government, trying to learn what Student Government is all about,” Pomerleau said. “I feel I have been serving the position well and I think the position is better served with someone who knows the position and has set relationships already than with people who had really no experience with student government.”
Pomerleau said that establishing good relationships with UMaine administrators is the biggest part of the job. Sankare sees it differently.
“The current president and vice president haven’t done a lot,” Sankare said. “The team underneath Pomerleau and Moran 2008 has done a lot more than Pomerleau and Moran,” he added “They [students] have had Bill as president for a semester. It is a lot of time, they haven’t seen a lot.”
Pomerleau said that Sankare’s comments lacked credibility. “I don’t really know what student government Gimbala is looking at but apparently he hasn’t been around the office or read the newspaper or anything much because we’ve all been busy.”
Pomerleau pointed out that student senate will be at full capacity for the first time in three years. He also said that he has been strict with finances.
“There is a lot of emphasis on making sure that money from students is not spent frivolously. At times, I think there is an overemphasis,” Pomerleau said.
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