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Clean Burn: SF City College Administrators Swindle Students out of $200G Biodiesel Grant
On April 19, City College of San
Francisco celebrated Earth Day by
showcasing alternative fuel and electrically powered vehicles on the school’s
Ram Plaza. Among the line-up of vehicles was a biodiesel hot rod that some
fellow CCSF students and I built in
the school’s Automotive Department.
The hotrod is a 1974 El Camino Super
Sport that was originally gas powered
with a 350 Chevy engine. We pulled
the engine and replaced it with 6.2 liter
GMC diesel engine and filled the tank
with biodiesel.
The biodiesel hot rod project was
initiated in the fall of 2005 by a few of
us from the CCSF Anarchist Library-a
group that has maintained a lending library in the school’s Student Union for
the last five years. The group’s motivation for the project was to expose ourselves and other working class students
to a fuel that can be made cheap or for
free with the use of the proper filtration
unit, as well as to see how fast we could
get a car going on the fuel. Another one
of our goals was to activate
our biodiesel filling station
at City College and learn
how to provide an accessible
and affordable fuel source,
which we would use to power a collectively-run moving
service fleet. This would allow us the ability to provide
a living wage for struggling
students as well as hooking
up a working class community with super cheap
fuel. Converting hot rods
in particular is important to the club
members, who see fit to give the current
image of eco-friendly driving some appeal outside the realm of upper-middle
class liberal environmentalists.
Hence the biodiesel El Camino Super Sport. This is a car that one could
throw a set of 22s on and proudly show
off. So when club members showed up
with the Super Sport for the Earth Day
event, they had no problem attracting a
crowd of car enthusiasts. After all, the
car was looking tight, with a fresh coat
of paint and an engine loud enough to
wake the block up and turn some heads.
When students found out that it was
biodiesel fueled and had the potential
to run off waste grease from the school
cafeteria, jaws dropped in amazement.
After much hard work, we had successfully produced a mean machine that
runs on free fuel, is better for the environment, and better for human health.
Three days after the auto show,
MTV aired their "Pimp My Green Ride"
episode, in which they took a beater
‘65 Chevy Impala and did a similar engine swap to the one we did. Even the
Governator himself appeared to give
a thumbs-up for biodiesel. Then they
took the Impala to the racetrack where
they raced a Lamborghini at the quarter
mile, leaving the flashy Italian racecar
in the dust. Needless to say, pimped
out alt-fuel automobiles, like all things
“green,” are ripe for the mainstream.
Despite all of this popularity, our
Biodiesel Club has been met with serious resistance from the Evan’s campus administration.
Vice-Chancellor Phyllis
McGuire, the Dean of the
Evans Campus, has refused
to allow the club access to
funding for our project and
denied us a permanent space
to keep the El Camino, prioritizing the project of the
Motorsports Club instead.
It is a front club started by
staff member Ron Young,
who posed as a student by
signing up for one class so he could start
a club and work his way into Student
Government. Over time, Young somehow got his paws on $19,000 of student
activity money to buy a Kit Cobra race
car. With full support from Dean McGuire and limited student involvement,
Young managed to finally get the car
running five years later, only to total it
on Evans Campus. After teachers told
him not to drive it, he invited our school
counselor Dennis to sit passenger as he
stepped on a stuck gas pedal and then,
stepping on a brake line that snapped,
he crashed into a pole and they were
both hospitalized. Dennis suffered severe head and knee injuries and hasn’t
returned to work since the accident,
which was in November.
The accident was quickly swept under the rug and all negative focus has
remained on the Biodiesel Club. In
fact, City College Police harassment
got so bad that we had to get automotive teachers who were fed up with
the cops’ harassment to convince the
Board of Trustees and the Chancellor
to step in on our behalf. That got the
police off our backs, but administration
found something new to hassle us about
when we decided to move club outreach
out from faculty advisor David Dias’
hands and into our own. Club members wanted to post fliers that reflected
our concerns and interests. The first
flier we posted focused on class issues
rather than environmental, picturing
Mickey Mouse flipping off the bosses
of oil companies. The flier was up for a
day before Dias found it and instructed
all fliers to be torn down, as it reflected
poorly the message that he wanted to
portray about biodiesel being better for
the environment. In one day our flier
brought in more people to a meeting
for new members than all of David’s fliers put together in the previous year. It
was a diverse crew of working class folks
ages 20-60, even one GI and a city college landscape worker. Dean McGuire
then instructed Dias to formally censor
the club, denying us all rights to advertise or be our own media contact. We
then decided to get rid of David and
go with Transmissions Instructor Barry
Lynch as the club’s new advisor.
Weeks later, David approached us
saying that the EPA was planning to
give the garage a biodiesel grant of
$200,000. Apparently the EPA had
seen what we did with the El Camino
and considered it cutting edge, while
the administration acted as though
they were supporting our project. The
Biodiesel Club was lead to believe that
the grant money would benefit the students, and we were asked to get the car
ready for a press conference. Spending
money out of pocket and backtracking
on the project, both club members and
faculty made the car picture-worthy.
In the end the grant money was put in
the pockets of the administrators, with
a small portion to go toward a biodiesel workshop that CCSF students are
not allowed to attend. Anarchist club
members were not surprised by this
swindle. Unfortunately it left other
students and faculty upset for being
lied to. If anything, this latest scandal
validates the anarchist standpoint that
we, the working class, must take production of bio-fuel into our own hands
and not concern ourselves with going
mainstream in hopes of getting the approval of big oil, and automotive and
transportation industries.
From Fault Lines #21
From Fault Lines #21
For more information:
http://indybay.org/faultlines
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Do your homework bub
Thu, Jun 28, 2007 8:46PM
Anarchist Club
Wed, Jun 27, 2007 2:44PM
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