Two parties announce candidacy for RHA elections

The Residence Housing Association election season officially kicked off last night with a meeting covering the rules of the campaign.\nThe two parties running for the March 2 election are the Connect ticket and the Amplify ticket.\nConnect's primary goal is to improve communication with students living in residence halls and Residential Programs and Services leaders. \n"We're really just out to listen to the residents in different resident centers and provide them a voice to the RPS administration," said sophomore Joe Reid, who's running for vice-president of internal affairs. "That's why we chose Connect as our name."\nConnect presidential-hopeful John Palmer is even going so far as to promise that, if elected, his ticket will regularly visit residence hall floors to hear the comments and complaints of students.\n"The student voice needs to be brought around any static and brought directly to the administration," Palmer said.\nThe Connect ticket is also out to improve the success of RHA events.\n"A need to increase the success of RHA events and make effective use of student activity money is absolutely necessary," Palmer said. "We've got to make sure that we are listening to the student voice and putting out only programs they'll be interested in."\nAmplify presidential candidate, junior Jon Greene, also wants to improve communication with dorm residents, but he said he sees his ticket taking a more modern approach.\n"RHA always has an open door policy, but we want a Web site where residents can send their ideas," he said. "We can't talk to every person every week, but if we get a lot of requests for something, it gives us more negotiating power when dealing with RPS. Most people feel like when they live in the dorms they don't have a voice to change things. We want to change that."\nAnother aspect of RHA Amplify wants to change is the way Channel 7, IU's residence hall movie channel, is run. Currently, the movies run are selected from all the e-mails sent to RHA, but not all of those requests can be satisfied.\n"About 30 or 40 percent of those e-mails can't be filled because we don't have access to those movies," Greene said. "We want people to be able to request things we can actually get."\nThat may be a lot to promise, but Greene vows to follow through.\n"We have the means to fulfill all of our platforms, and 100 percent intention of doing so," he said.\nThe next stop on the campaign trail will be a debate forum at 9 p.m. Feb. 26 with a location to be announced.\n-- Contact senior writer Chris Freiberg at wfreiber@indiana.edu.