Editorials:

Daily Cal Board Makes Last-ditch Lease Offer

After seventeen months of wrangling, the UC Berkeley student government made a final lease offer to independent campus newspaper the Daily Californian.

The proposal, which would run until June 2006, dropped controversial provisions requiring the paper to formulate a code of conduct and hire an independent editor to address concerns from minority students.

“We just wanted to move on with this issue,” said Taina Gomez of the Associated Students of the University of California Store Operations Board, which negotiates leases for the student government. “We felt like the code would have been valuable, but this has been going on so long and has taken up too many monthly meetings.”

The Daily Californian has rented space at student government-owned Eshleman Hall since the paper returned to campus in 1994. In the face of the proposed lease provisions that the paper’s editors said would violate its free speech, the paper’s management had signed a non-binding letter of intent to rent an office just across the street from campus on Bancroft Way.

Daily Californian Editor in Chief Eric Schewe said the final decision whether or not to stay on campus will be made at an Oct. 4 meeting of the paper’s board of directors.