USG: Give credit where credit is due

USG: Give credit where credit is due

Editorial

So go ahead and color us impressed.Like most things at this university – including this venerable publication – the OSU Undergraduate Student Government can often be a hit-or-miss, even scattershot operation. This time, however, we believe it’s safe to say they’ve firmly placed themselves in a position to indisputably reestablish their relevancy to the entire student body.It’s often been said that necessity is the mother of invention, and if you’ve ever had the dubious distinction of having lived in the University District you know that USG’s so-called “Landlord Library” is going to fill a need that has been ignored for far too long. The inspired notion that, gee, OSU students might actually benefit from a systematic rating of landlords and rental companies on campus, was first bandied about by John Carney during his successful bid for the undergrad presidency last year. And now that it looks like this campaign promise is actually going to come to fruition, we can contain ourselves no longer: The idea of thoroughly rating the landlords and rental companies around campus is the best idea we’ve heard from USG since… well, in a real long time.Don’t we all have a horror story to tell? ‘Bout time we got a proper forum.Let’s face it, when searching for a place to live most of us have neither the patience nor the resources to methodically check out the backgrounds and reputations of each rental company or individual landlord. In fact, if the truth be told, most of us either really don’t care (at the time) about the quality of service provided or rely on anecdotal endorsements from friends and co-workers to guide our decisions.We may, of course, find ourselves forced to reevaluate the wisdom of these methods the first time our rental company or landlord gives a less than satisfactory answer to the age old questions “When are you going to come out and fix the heat?,” “Why can’t you just send an exterminator?,” and “Why has my bathtub suddenly become a part of my living room suite?” During such existential crises of identity an honest landlord can mean the difference between a relatively comfortable existence and an overwhelming desire to embrace the abyss.USG’s ambitious plan to survey 2,500 OSU students is purported to be nearly complete. And after the data is compiled and analyzed we may very well have our first coherent picture of just which landlords can be counted as reliable and fair, and which can be considered sleazebags of monumental proportions. At a cost of around $8,000, it’s not often that the student body gets such a potentially useful return on such a relatively paltry investment.This example of students helping other students epitomizes everything that’s good about student government; service combined with a little bit of enlightened self interest. Hey, we’re all for it. We applaud USG for their efforts. We thank Kevin Cope, the junior who’s heading up the program. And we give credit to John Carney for once again making good on the commitments he made to the student body during his election campaign.You, sir, truly are a promise keeper.