Unanimous vote leads to ethical questions

    Well, the verdict is in – representative democracy in Milledgeville is not what it should be.  Tuesday night, the City Council unanimously voted in Ordnance 0-25, a law that will limit the amount of non-related individuals that can live in a house to three.  Besides, of course, having the direct effect of insuring that students will not live in houses within the affected areas (almost all areas where houses are located), the ordinance will also create a higher demand for apartments to accommodate students.  Anyone who has taken Economics 1001 can guess what this leads to: higher rent.
    The thing that stung me the most about this decision was not that it was voted in.  Anyone who looks at the Milledgeville voting lines on election days can see that majority of voters are older residents.  These same older voters seem to be the majority of people in support of this bill.  What surprised me was the fact that the vote was unanimous.  This implied to me that the City Council had a pre-conceived game plan coming into the meeting.  This, in my eyes, directly goes against what our country was founded on: our representatives listening to the people and voting on what the majority of people are in favor of.  With one third or more of the population being students and growing every day and another large portion being middle-aged people who’s income is paid by these students, it’s easy for one to understand why this is so damaging to our democratic system.
    The reasoning as to why the council would vote something like this in is easy for all to see. Heck, they even explained it in the ordnance itself.  The reason is so that the concepts of “community” and “family” are upheld in Milledgeville.  The problem that I, and many other students, have with this is that their definitions of community and family are from 20 years ago, when people did not have to go to college to survive, candy was a penny a piece and a large portion of the city was not composed of  students. Today college is essential. Lower rent allows for less time at work and more time for school. Having to have a $5.15 an hour full-time job does not allow this process to be completed.
    In essence, what we saw on Tuesday night was the catalyst to student-citizen disenfranchisement.  Milledgeville will soon have their neighborhoods free of drunken college students setting their houses ablaze and peeing in their bushes.  They will also have their neighborhoods free of caring, young students that spend their time watching your grandkids and spending money in your city.  You can expect the mega-plex apartments to have all of that. 
    Freshmen, remember this time, and when your rent is too much for you to bare, fill out that voter registration packet and vote.  If Zack Johnson had made it, the tally would have at least had one “no.”           
 
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Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 17 2006. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry