OUR VIEW: You paid the fee, now make it count

After floods of doubt, controversy, skepticism and a little hope exuded by a few brave students with nothing more than a dream and some resilience, the Blue Goes Green Fee was adopted by the university. As of this year, students were charged a few bucks each to fund a sustainability initiative that gives innovative young people who care about the planet they live on a chance to do something creative to help keep the grass green, the sky blue and the campus — and the world around it — nice enough to look at from day to day.

Depending on your political, religious, ideological, socioeconomic or other outlooks on life, you may or may not believe in things like human-induced climate change, the effectiveness and efficiency of recycling or the health benefits of eating organic or sustainable foods.

No matter your outlook on all things green, the fact remains that the Blue Goes Green Fee was passed and recently cost you 25 cents per credit to enroll as a USU student and register for classes. One-third of all the money allocated by the fee is awarded to students who devise plans such as retrofitting water bottle-filling devices onto existing university water fountains and providing bicycle-maintenance stations around campus. That means there is roughly $30,000 saved in a safe place, waiting for people to get their think on and come up with worthy ideas.

How are you going to make that money matter? It’s going to be given to somebody, so are you just going to sit there and continue to complain about something you can’t reverse? Or are you going to put your ire to work and come up with something you and your skeptical friends can benefit from? If only a few people apply for the grant money and their ideas are not much more than mediocre, they’ll still get the cash. This means the more people who propose a ground-breaking, earth-shattering, mind-blowing idea, the more competition there is to win the grant.

The more competition, the cooler the ideas that garnish our campus. Just think about it, ours may be the first-ever campus to have a cold-fusion trash compactor or a sun-powered computer lab; you could be the next person to be awarded a portion of that $30,000 and make our campus more innovative than it already is. Put your thinking caps on and make those ideas count.