Tuesday January 9,2001 Volume 100 Issued 79 dajlyneb.com Since 1901 f;v. i Hunting the stealthy beast: j Thoughts on coming home ' In Opinion/2 It's scary but true: Next year's voHeybal team may be better than the 2000 1 team that went 34-0. In SportsTuesday/10 i A1 > ins session anew UNL seeks money from state budget BY GWEN T1ETGEN Collecting more cash is on the brains of many university officials as the 97th legislative session begins. The university is seeking money for a laundry list of improvements, including raising faculty salaries, funding for health care costs, renovations of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and revital ization of rural Nebraska communities. Funding for faculty salaries is necessary for the university to stay competitive with its peer institu tions, said Ron Withem, the UNL director of gov ernment relations. “The core of academia is its faculty,” Withem said. “There’s a lot more requests for funds than is available. In the end, we hope to be persuasive enough to get what we asked for.” The state’s budget, which is set biennially, will be approved this year, and UNL hopes to get a share of the pie for all its requests. A piece of this pie would be eaten up by a 5.22 percent average salary increase for faculty, funds for increasing health care costs and a long-awaited replacement of the heating, air conditioning and humidity system in the Sheldon Art Gallery. A request for aid for the Sheldon Art Gallery was killed in the last legislative session. A new issue this session concerns the universi ty's status as a land grant institution. Because UNL is a land grant institution, it has a responsibility to provide funding for the economic development of rural Nebraska, Withem said. “We've been told by those in rural Nebraska that their economy needs some assistance,” Withem said. In answer to this, the university supports a rural initiative that would help rural Nebraska’s economic state. Tobacco settlement funds and cigarette tax money are among other issues the university has its eye on. The university will support an initiative to donate one-third of the tobacco settlement funds for biomedical research, Withem said. The university also supports the governor’s ini tiative to continue a two-cent diversion of the cig Please see UNIVERSITY on 7 / Veteranssee seats go to newsenators BY GEORGE GREEN As university students entered classrooms for the first time Monday, state legislators walked into the Capitol to begin their fourth day on the job. The 97th Legislature convened last Wednesday and has since tackled questions concerning com mittee assignments and chairmanships and has begun introducing new legislation. Last week, some veteran senators were sur prised to learn they had lost their committee seats to less experienced - and even freshmen - sena tors. One of the most poignant examples of younger senators taking seats from veterans occurred in the Appropriations Committee. Two veteran senators, Mark Quandahl and Pam Brown, both from Omaha, were passed over in favor of a brand new Omaha senator, Lowen Kruse. Brown, who had served on the Appropriations Committee for six years, said the special Committee on Committees, which decides com mittee membership, might have ignored her request because of her fiscally conservative ideol ogy “I can only operate on what I heard about me being too frugal,” she said. Although she said she was disappointed with the Committee on Committees’ judgment, Brown said she could live with the decision. “You live by the sword, and you die by the sword,” she said. Kruse's appointment tips the balance on the Appropriations Committee toward new senators who have never worked on a two-year budget before. Brown said veteran senators have the neces Please see SENATORS on 3 £is JjL r4> , £ * A : A .. Sen. Chip Maxwell of Omaha checks his e-mail Monday in the Legislative Chamber. Maxwell is serving his first term in the Legislature and is still familiarizing himself with his computer after thT^ ^ fourth day of the new session. Redistricting state among tasks BY GEORGE GREEN The Legislature kicked off its 97th session with a full plate of work. The year will be particularly busy because the Legislature has to tackle redistricting the state, a daunting task that rises only once every 10 years when the Census is taken. Moreover, the Legislature has to complete a two-year budget for the state in a year where budget shortfalls are being discussed in terms of hun dreds of millions of dollars. Sen. Roger Wehrbein of Plattsmouth, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said redistricting the state to comply with census tract numbers will be "con tentious.” Redistricting generally pits urban districts against rural ones or eastern districts against western ones, he said. Population shifts from rural areas to urban cities generate bitter dis putes as lines are redrawn to match population densities. Sen. Jon Burning of Sarpy County said preliminary numbers seem to indicate that Lincoln and Omaha stand to gainatTeast-S-se^ts jn the Legislature. Tnese additional seats will have to be sacrificed by western districts, he said. “It’s going to be a very delicate process,” Burning said. Senators will not have time on their side when they tweak district boundaries because the find census numbers will not be avdlable until April 1, Bruning sdd. This leaves the senators just two months to hash out the boundaries. To get an early start on the issue, the Legislature planned to debate the rules of the redistricting process today, said Sen. Bob Wickersham of Harrison, chairman of the Revenue Committee. Senators will consider forming a special committee composed of three senators from each congressional dis trict charged with overseeing the work, he said.