To the Editors:

While the 2004 presidential election is dominating the political landscape, there is an election whose outcome could have a much greater bearing on our lives as residents, however transient we may be, of Oberlin.

This election is the Oberlin City Council election, to be held this Tuesday, Nov. 4. As any one who’s been at least semi-conscious for the last few years can tell, energy policy, energy consumption and energy extraction are some of the most, if not the most pressing issues of this era.

They’re the root of the September 11 attacks, global warming, 30,000 annual premature deaths in Ohio, the Enron scandal, the California power crisis, the blackout of this past summer…and the list goes on.

With this in mind a group of students concerned about local energy issues have set out to find which city council candidates have the strongest commitment to making Oberlin more sustainable in its energy use.

Daniel Gardner came out on top as one of the strongest supporters of sustainable energy practices. He’s shown a strong commitment to these principles in his past work with The Oberlin Design Initiative, a local non-profit working towards sustainable energy use in Oberlin, the economic justice, whose board of trustees he sits on, and the Oberlin College Office of College-Community Relations, in which he was the director.

Gardner is in favor of creating a ‘green’ building code and providing tax incentives to encourage the use of more energy efficient technologies and building practices. He would also like to slow the rate at which the college is removing students from town housing, so that the local housing market will have more time to adjust to the changes in demand.

One of his plans for the vacant housing stock is employer-assisted housing. This type of program would work with local banks, Fannie Mae, and employers to retrofit houses with more energy efficient technologies and insulation, as well as provide low-income families with more opportunity to own their own homes.

Gardner has many other strong policy proposals, but to list them all would take too much space and time, just as our limited resources prevent us from creating this type of endorsement for all the qualified candidates.
But, if this alone has not moved you to vote for Daniel Gardner, some other candidates to keep in mind at the ballot box who are like minded individuals are his slate mates, Charles Peterson and Eve Sandberg, and incumbent council member and head of the Oberlin Design Initiative board of trustees, Ronnie Rimbert.

If you don’t exercise, your muscles will atrophy and weaken; the same goes for your rights. Vote!

-Jim Casteleiro
College Junior