Your fees fund ASI president's full ride

Author

Carly Heltzel
April 23, 2025

Good morning. It’s Wednesday, and I’m reading about upcoming SLO Film Festival that starts tomorrow and runs over 100 films through Tuesday. Onto the five Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

Some 67% of students don’t know their quarterly ASI fees go toward funding a full ride for the ASI president, according to a poll from Mustang News. If you were one of them, welcome. Full ride means 100% of the president’s tuition, housing and educational costs are compensated, and five other ASI positions also get between 25% and 75% of their cost of education paid for. So when you vote in the ASI presidential election today, you are putting your money where your mouth is whether you knew that or not.

2.

Cal Poly’s athletic director spoke out about the swim and dive program cut for the first time in an interview. He blamed the program’s discontinuation on 8% cuts to Cal State funding, having a large amount of teams for our conference and the NCAA-wide settlement that will cost Cal Poly $550,000 per year for the next 12 years. He said the program cut is “literally the worst thing you can go through with the exception of maybe loss of life of a student or staff member.”

3.

Paso Robles City Council is suing one of its members in a potentially “first of its kind” lawsuit in California. The council said this was the only possible method to get him to comply with the California Public Records Act after he refused to turn over records reporters requested. The Tribune, which filed the initial request, previously sued this councilmember to find him in violation of the act. He tried to get the council to pay his legal fees, only to find himself stonewalled by another lawsuit.

4.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s tuition-free private elementary school is shutting down. Its initial founding in 2016 was to give back to communities in East Palo Alto and the East Bay that had been largely displaced by the growth of Facebook, now Meta. Parents and kids of the 443-student school were blindsided by the closure, calling it “a shock,” “unfair,” and “a slap in the face.” Ultimately, a broken promise. “We both wanted to cry,” said one parent referring to her daughter.

5.

When you think of smog, it’s probably an image of LA’s valley. But after decades of air quality improvements and reduction of smog-related emissions… it’s still the smoggiest city in the U.S. Over the past 26 years, LA receive top slot 25 times. There have been improvements, with the number of unhealthy ozone days per year dropping 40% since 2000, but the “poison in the air” remains a huge health risk factor. At least it’s not “the kinds of skies that triggered our clean air laws in the first place,” one expert said.