In a nearly split vote, about 8,800 California Faculty Association (CFA)  members decided to cut their own wages by 10 percent this week.

The California State University (CSU) and the CFA finalized agreements Wednesday on two-day per month faculty furloughs — non-work days without compensation –  in the vote that passed by 54 percent.

The CSU will save about half of the $584 million budget deficit through the furloughs. Of that total, Cal Poly will save approximately $16 million .

As a Cal Poly lecturer of 12 years, Sherrie Amido had to decide between the possibility of her job being cut or everyone’s salary being reduced.

“I couldn’t imagine myself standing up in front of the classroom and letting my students ask me why I couldn’t take a 10 percent pay cut, when they may have a 30 percent tuition increase,” she said.

The alternative — retaining full faculty pay and implementing layoffs,which would likely cut a majority of lecturer positions — doesn’t comply with the CSU’s mission in Amido’s eyes.

“We still have students that we’re trying to get through the CSU system,” Amido said. “That’s what the CSU is focused on. How do we do that? We offer furloughs. Why furloughs? Because it can save classes, it can save some of these lecture jobs so that we can get students through in a timely fashion.”

But she realizes why many of her fellow faculty members planned to vote against the furlough.

“You can understand why people would be unhappy, because, guess what? We’re not paid that much to begin with,” Amido said.

History professor Lewis Call said the pay cuts will devastate his personal finances because, although he and his wife both work, it’s not enough money to sustain his family.

“Even before the furloughs, we just weren’t making it financially,” Call said. “The 10 percent pay cut will completely cripple us, and I’m sure many other faculty — especially junior faculty — are in the same boat.”

Call said that the furlough is unfair because there is an expectation for the same amount of work with less pay.

“A real furlough brings some reduction in workload, but we have not been offered any workload reduction, so it is simply a 10 percent pay cut,” Call said.

Although faculty are expected to take off two days each month, which is technically a 10 percent reduction in workload, details of where that time will come from and how it will impact class schedules is yet to be determined.

Another problem he has is that the CSU furlough cuts everyone’s pay equally instead of proportionately to their salary — like the UC’s proposed furlough plan.

The University of California furloughs range from 11 days (a 4 percent pay cut) for the lowest paid employees to 26 days (a 10 percent pay cut) for the highest-paid.

The Memorandum of Understanding issued Wednesday said the president of each CSU campus may designate specific furlough days or partial campus closure days, depending on the needs of the campus.

Faculty members are not permitted to take more than one furlough day in the same work week and all furlough days must be taken before June 30, 2010. Administrators like Vice President of Academic Affairs Bob Koob and President Warren Baker are also included in the 10 percent salary cuts.

There is also a concern that a ‘brain drain’ will make it harder to attract and keep the most qualified faculty and staff.
Koob said that the economic damage will likely cause some Cal Poly employees to be drawn to other higher-paying institutions, but it won’t be a permanent loss.

“Clearly this damage will cause people to leave, but it’ll be short-sighted,” Koob said. “These economic recessions happen in cycles. We can develop more flexibility if we can deal with this one . . . and come out stronger on the other side.”

In a press release issued by Cal Poly last week, President Baker said management is “working hard to avoid layoffs, but some may be necessary.”

Although she sometimes returns the gaze — a habit she picked up from the first 30 years of her life when she still had vision — all Weiss can see now are faint blurs in her peripheral vision.

It’s this characteristic that places Weiss, a social sciences junior, among the 71 students at Cal Poly categorized as “disabilities students” who rely on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to receive an education.

The law was passed in 1998 and outlaws discrimination against people with disabilities. Recent revisions involving electronic compatibility have forced the California State University to adopt a system-wide goal of achieving full ADA compliance for all digital information by 2012.

The university has already begun implementing ADA compliance with three focus areas of Web accessibility, instructional materials accessibility and software adoption.

Trey Duffy, director of disability services at the disabilities resource center on campus, explained the process simply.

“Anything that can be heard needs to be seen and anything that can be seen needs to be heard,” he said.

For Web developers, compliance ranges from avoiding color combinations that could trigger seizures to closed captioning videos for the hearing-impaired.

A Web page that is unreadable to a computer program is the equivalent to a physical world without ramps and elevators, Duffy said.

For Weiss, accessibility is very personal.

“It’s about making people with disabilities be the best that they can be,” she said. “If it wasn’t for the DRC, I would not be able to make it through college.”

ITS and DRC have approached the process of ADA compliance in three phases. The first step, which is now over, was raising awareness. Cal Poly is currently transitioning between step two, knowledge, and step three, skills.

Mary Shaffer, who is in charge of overseeing the compliance process at Cal Poly, said that an overall change in perspective needs to come to the university. Instead of accommodating for the individual needs of individual students, the goal is that everyone plans ahead before they buy, design and teach.

The first area of focus is the Web. To be compliant, the biggest concern is that all sites need to be formatted in a way that is accessible to anyone who is partially or fully blind or hearing-impaired.

This means that every photo must have a description –known as alternate text — written into the programming language behind the scenes of each Web page. This description isn’t visible to the everyday user unless they put their cursor over the image. [Click here to see a COMPLIANT SITE and here to see aNON-COMPLIANT SITE].

But to a blind person, this text is important because when the Web page is run through a computer program specially created for a blind person – or semi-blind person like Weiss — the description of a photo would read something like, “Photo of a student riding a bike.”

For a deaf student viewing a Web page, all audio must be transcribed so that it can be visually read and all video must be closed captioned. While that might not mean much for a professor using a Web site, for organizations like CPTV, it would mean hours of extra work for each video produced.

“We’ve been working extensively with departments to redesign or retrofit,” Shaffer said.

Each college has Web accessibility coordinators who oversee progress at a college-wide level. On a departmental level, there are staff or faculty site managers who are in charge of department Web sites.

Valanche Stewart is the Web accessibility coordinator for the College of Liberal Arts. He said that so far, the College of Liberal Arts is leading the way at Cal Poly, with four department Web sites that are 100 percent compatible and another three that are awaiting approval.

“There’s a little resistance to change, but they’re adapting,” Stewart said.

The priority has been in getting all department sites compliant, but starting in the fall they’ll move forward to ensure that all sub-sites and faculty sites are compliant, Stewart said.

“It’s a good thing we have three more years,” Stewart said, referencing the 2012 goal. “We’re probably going to need all of them.”

He said that the biggest difficulty isn’t the technical work, but changing the mindset.

“Once you show them how to do it, they can make it part of their workflow,” he said. “I’m optimistic we can reach 100 percent compliance by 2012. But when a site is compliant, you’re not done. . . it needs to be an ongoing habit.”

For practicality purposes, Shaffer and Duffy said the emphasis is on compatibility of new sites, rather than retrofitting of older sites. But the act isn’t only limited to the Web; any class material that is electronically conveyed needs to be accessible too, including PowerPoint slideshows.

Weiss is a student with retinochoroiditis, meaning she can still see movement in her periphery. She uses a monoscope in class to zoom in the projector screen.

To get an idea of how she views the world, she said to hold your fists up to your face and focus on them without looking away. Everything in the farthest edge of your peripherals — usually indiscernible blurs– is the only thing she can see.

At the end of the day, she reviews her class materials in a digital format on one of her two massive computer screens at home. She uses a program called Zoomtext that magnifies the text to a size so large that only four words fill the screen at a time. She puts the monitor to her face and listens as the robot-sounding voice reads the text back to her.

When her class materials are not provided in an accessible digital format, the DRC steps in to make accommodations.

Duffy said the DRC scanned 78,000 pages worth of non-compliant material in 2008-09 and turned it into a digital format. If full compliance was achieved by the 2012 goal, though, the DRC would no longer have to play the middleman between publishers and disabilities students.

“We’re basically putting ourselves out of a job,” Duffy said.

In addition to Web sites and instructional material, compliance also extends to instructional software. Before departments purchase software more than $15,000, it will be screened to ensure that it can be available in multiple formats to accommodate for those with disabilities.

A challenge, Duffy said, is that the virtual world can be controlled by anyone.

In the real world, architects are licensed and forced to follow building guidelines for accessibility. In the cyber world, anyone is qualified to create a Web site, making it hard to enforce.

“Our approach is knowledge, not enforcement,” Shaffer said. “Strict enforcement at this point is going to make us an enemy in the long run.”

So what’s the real story behind this four-wheeled spectacle?

It’s more than just a toy. Rashed Talukder, a computer engineering junior, revamped a Power Wheels car as part of the first stages of his senior project.

Talukder was ticketed the afternoon of May 19 at South Perimeter Street for violation of Vehicle Code 21716: Golf Cart Operation.

The state motor vehicle code states that “No person shall operate a golf cart on any highway except in a speed zone of 25 miles per hour or less.”

University Police Chief Bill Watton said Talukder was ticketed for riding on California Boulevard’s bike lane, causing numerous complaints from drivers who couldn’t see the car, which is low to the ground.

“It would scare the hell out of me to be in that thing in a traffic lane,” Watton said. “There’s no way in the world I’d do that with the drivers and the cell phones and all the things going on.”

The California Department of Motor Vehicles Web site defines a golf cart as a “motor vehicle having not less than three wheels in contact with the ground, having an unladen weight less than 1,300 pounds, which is designed to be and is operated at not more than 15 miles per hour and designed to carry golf equipment and not more than two persons, including the driver.”

Although Talukder’s vehicle wasn’t designed to carry golf equipment, San Luis Obispo Police Department and University Police Department officials say the real issue deals with the student’s safety.

“SLOPD was just doing its job,” Talukder said. “They got a lot of calls so they had to respond.”

Taluker said he had no ill intent for his revamped Power Wheels.

Standing at about three feet above the ground, Talukder modified the plastic vehicle to include a solid frame, headlights and taillights, a horn, iPod connection and speakers, 500-watt motor, rubber wheels and an ignition.

In addition to creating an autonomous vehicle for his senior project — which will implement safety sensors for children’s vehicles and potentially full-sized cars — the car is a cheap and green way of getting to school.

“I made this thing for really two reasons. It costs me like 10 cents each day that I drive it,” Talukder said. “And there’s no maintenance. I don’t have to drive my car around, it’s green, I can park it wherever really, it’s really convenient for me, especially with my chronic asthma,” Talukder said.

Another reason Talukder enjoys riding in the car is the response he gets from the campus community.

“It puts smiles on people’s faces. It literally does,” Talukder said. “I go around and I think that’s one of the best things — one of the highs in life where you can do something for someone and not really expect something back in return.”

Before Tuesday’s incident, Talukder was pulled over twice — once by the San Luis Obispo Police Department and once by the California Highway Patrol — and was warned by University Police. He said he was advised to stay on the sidewalk, instead of in the bike lane when driving the vehicle.

“They couldn’t find anything at the time, law and restriction wise, to keep me from driving around, so they said I should stay on the sidewalk and possibly wear a helmet,” he said about the initial pull-over by the San Luis Obispo Police.

The day he was ticketed, Talukder wandered from the sidewalk to the bike lane for the duration of a block because he couldn’t find a disability ramp to get on the curb.

“If you were completely immobilized just with a man-powered wheelchair, you’d have to roll back down the hill or go back down the hill or go a block over and all the way around,” Talukder said. “That’s completely unacceptable in my opinion.”

Political science senior Tai Dang said the sidewalk isn’t the best place for a motor-powered vehicle to be.

“He shouldn’t be on the sidewalk, that’s for pedestrians,” Dang said. “I have the same problem with skateboarders, but at least (Talukder) has brakes.”

Talukder had been using the vehicle — weather permitting — for the past four months on his three-and-a-half mile journey from his home to Cal Poly’s campus. At the advice of University Police Department’s Associate Director Cindy Campbell, Talukder chained the Power Wheels car to a bike rack on campus.

One student, agriculture systems sophomore Stephen Abertolle, said he’d seen Talukder outside Kennedy Library and he was never disrupting the peace.

“He was just cruising,” Abertolle said. “It’s kind of messed up that he got a ticket. He can’t go that fast.”

“I think it’s ridiculous he got a ticket for it,” said electrical engineering senior Myles Still. “I mean, it’s a Power Wheels car.”

Talukder wouldn’t say whether he plans to fight the ticket, but he researched vehicle codes before building the car to try to protect himself from receiving one.

“I tried to be civil about it, to be safe about it,” Talukder said. “When they say that it’s for my own safety, I find that a little hard to swallow … I told them that I ordered a flag for it and I was going to put it on as soon as it came in.”

However the flag is not needed anymore.

Talukder said that the police told him that his car would be impounded if he drives it again. Although he doesn’t intend to ride his Power Wheels again on campus, the image of possible impoundment is comical to Talukder.

“I actually want to see the tow truck driver as he tows it away,” Talukder said, laughing. “I think it’d be the funniest thing in the world, but at the same time not funny because I don’t want it impounded.”

Watton verified the possibility of impoundments.

“If he drives it in traffic, that’s probably exactly the case (that the car will be impounded),” Watton said. “On campus, as long as he stays on the sidewalk, we’re not going to bother him, as long as he’s not blocking the sidewalk or anything like that.”

Lt. Tom DePriest of the San Luis Obispo Police Department also said impoundment was a possibility.

“You can’t modify and drive vehicles on  the road that you can’t register,” DePriest said. He said that some motor-powered bicycles and scooters are registerable, but that plastic, off-the-shelf toys aren’t — even with a motor.

Watton said he has never seen Power Wheels being driven on campus before, but has seen other vehicles that are sometimes hard to regulate, like power scooters and motor bicycles.

“There are so many of them out there now,” Watton said. “The laws are real strange in that you have to really look closely to see how it fits and what it fits.”

Updated at 9:03 a.m. on May 26, 2009 with new information from SLOPD.

Because the risks are so high, athletic departments across the country are increasingly re-evaluating their policies.

Cal Poly, however, does not have an official policy and probably never will, athletics director Alison Cone said.

Just because the university hasn’t implemented a formal policy, though, doesn’t mean school officials aren’t concerned about the hazards.

Beginning with the recruiting process, Shannon Stephens, the athletics department director of Academic Services, warns athletes of the dangers in the evolving cyber world.

“You get into this kind of freedom-of-speech thing at a public university,” Stephens said. “Then, at the same time, you have the mission statement of the athletics department and the institution.”

Cases necessitating such warnings have taken on many forms.

In April, Buffalo men’s basketball player Andy Robinson posted a Facebook solicitation offering $30 to $40 to anyone who’d read a certain book to write a paper for him. After the student newspaper reported on the note a day later, he was suspended.

A month prior, members of the Slippery Rock (of Pennsylvania) track and field team were suspended from a meet after pictures featuring underage drinking at a party were posted on the site.

Some universities, such as Loyola Chicago and Minnesota Duluth, have even completely forbid their athletes from belonging to Facebook.

Elsewhere in recent years, alcohol-laden party pictures have led to suspensions of women’s soccer players at San Diego State, and portrayals of hazing led to the same at Northwestern.

Facebook ultimatums have been issued at Florida State and Kentucky.

But some schools haven’t been so generous to provide such grace periods for athletes to clean things up.

In May 2005, Eddie Kenney and Matt Coenen were promptly booted off the LSU swim team after it was learned they were members of a Facebook group publicizing disparaging comments regarding their coaches.

Other, less individualized postings on the site have garnered outrage spilling into surrounding communities.

Hundreds attended a protest march in the Bay Area following the January 2007 publication by Santa Clara student athletes of photos featuring them at an off-campus, allegedly racist birthday party. (Costumes, modeled after a “south of the border” theme, mocked Latinos through stereotypical depictions of Mexican gardeners, maids, gangsters and pregnant women.)

In 2006, Kent State, which revised an initial ban into stringent guidelines, was among the first universities to implement an express policy.

“Our policy fits our student athletes’ code of conduct, which says they cannot have things that would embarrass yourself, family, team, coaches or athletic department,” Kent State athletics director Laing Kennedy explained.

The new approach requires student athletes to provide their coaches access to their profiles.

Kennedy said the university’s legal counsel had no qualms over a freedom-of-speech violation.

Just those concerns, though, trouble Cone.

“I know there are some athletics departments who have told (student athletes), ‘You can’t be on the social networking sites,’ ” Cone said. “I’m not sure that’s appropriate, but we do want them to present themselves as representatives of Cal Poly.”

Cone said she would be “stomping” on students’ rights with a ban. “To me that seems punitive and excessive,” Cone said. “But to demand that they use good judgment, I think we have every right to do.”

Scott Cartwright, head coach of Cal Poly’s men’s and women’s golf teams, said the school shouldn’t have a written policy, but rather recommendations.

“There’s still freedom to do what they wish,” Cartwright said. “The thing we talk about is that they need to be aware of what they’re putting out there, and they are in the public eye.”

Conversations with athletes regarding social networking sites are repeated at the start of each quarter.

“They’re role models for young children,” Cone said. “We talk to them about making sure that anything that is on their Facebook pages would be appropriate for young children to be seeing.”

Three years ago, when the athletics department first became aware that athletes throughout the country were posting inappropriate photos for all to see, it started educating its own.

“When those started getting out in the media we made it a point of talking to student athletes and saying that they need to be aware,” said Brian Thurmond, Cal Poly Athletics’ media relations director. “What’s out there on Facebook is public information and anyone can download it. It’s amazing what turns up.”

Cone said since the education process started, Cal Poly athletes’ understandings of the issues have improved.

“As far as I can tell, they’ve used pretty good judgment,” she said.

Thurmond said the concern over social networking content extends into the athletes’ post-college lives.

“I’m finding out in terms of business and being with people, potential employers are starting to look at that,” Thurmond said. “This is not just something that is just for your friends. This is something that’s wide open for everybody to see and it could affect how you’re perceived.”

In addition to talking to students each quarter, Stephens started an athlete orientation program, which also stresses the importance of representing Cal Poly positively.

Coming from UCLA, Stephens witnessed firsthand the dangers social networking can pose.

“Athletes, I think, are targeted because of their profile or because of the media,” he said.

Because the sites allow people to post contact information, housing locations and even class schedules, safety can be put at risk.

“There were some instances (at UCLA) where it was actually almost like stalking occurred,” Stephens said. “It was a little bit scary.”

Of course, the trend isn’t exclusive to colleges. In the professional ranks, athletes have become more guarded in light of Web sites such as BadJocks.com and TheDirty.com pursuing pictures and videos capturing sports stars engaged in unsavory or even criminal activities.

Bad Jocks, whose Web site banner boasts the phrase, “Where COPS meets SportsCenter,” was the first to post photos of Catholic University’s women’s lacrosse team getting rowdy with a male stripper in a thong two years ago. The site also features a chart of sports figures with the highest blood-alcohol content.

Mustangs junior hurdler M.J. Robotham said the athletics department does a “good job” emphasizing potential consequences of inappropriate material.

“All the student athletes do a good job at keeping Facebook clean,” he said. “I’ve been to a couple of parties and whenever there is a camera, the student athletes are very careful of the pictures that are taken. The student athletes are very careful of what is posted, also, and will tell someone to delete the picture on Facebook.”

Cone said that if, hypothetically, a Cal Poly athlete were caught with inappropriate content on his or her profile – whether it be underage-drinking photos or obscene comments – the department would simply ask that it be removed.

“We’d probably just talk to them and tell them to change it,” Cone said. “If they refused to change it, I suppose it would be our right to have them not participate in athletics.”

Photo taken by Lauren Rabaino

When Morninglory Music, a record store in downtown Santa Barbara, recently closed its doors for good, owner Stan Bernstein attributed the decision to the growing number of people who download music illegally online. But in San Luis Obispo, independent record stores see another problem: commercial retailers.

“Downloading, that happened quite a while back and it’s certainly a factor, but the biggest thing that hurts independent record stores is Best Buy,” said Richard Ferris , owner of Cheap Thrills record store which has been in San Luis Obispo since 1971.

Best Buy’s tactic is to cut back the price of a new release to $9.98, even though it’s costing them and independent record stores up to $12.98 to buy, Ferris said. Calls to Best Buy were not returned by press time.

“Nothing ruins a customer’s loyalty to you like them thinking you’re charging an unfair price,” Ferris said, which is why he’s dropped prices on new releases to remain competitive.

“We don’t let them undersale us, no matter what it costs us,” Ferris said. “But that isn’t fair. It’s not right.”

Mike White, co-owner of BooBoo Records, which has been in downtown San Luis Obispo since 1974, echoed that sentiment.

“It’s the devaluing of the percieved value of a CD by these companies like Best Buy, Walmart, Circut City, that are using our industry, the music industry, as their loss leader,” White said.

He said the price cuts get customers in the door for a cheap CD, and out the door with an overpriced item.

“It gets you in the door, that’s the point,” Ferris said. “They’re not making money off of music no matter how much they sell.”

Ferris said roughly 3,000 independent record stores have been driven out of business in recent years, not from downloads but from commercial enterprises.

“As far as independents, we’re past the 2/3 mark and headed toward the 3/4 mark of independent stores being striked,” he said. “It’s a pretty dark, dark scene and I don’t know what the future will be.”

It’s a prospect White said is foreshadowing for the independent record businesses nationwide.

“It’s short-sighted if that’s where you’re doing all your shopping, because if you’re doing it all there and you’re buying it cheap, then stores like us aren’t going to be around anymore,” White said.

One long-time independent record store supporter in San Luis Obispo County said he values the one-on-one interaction that you can’t get from commercial retailers.

“You’re more likely to get good advice about new music to listen to from your local record stores,” said Chuck Cesena from Los Osos who has been a BooBoos and Cheap Thrills customer since 1984. “You can develop a relationship with the clerks– they know you, you know them.”

The commercial retailer problem combined with the iTunes revolution is what hurts the local record stores, owners said.

“Downloading is part of it,” Ferris said. “If it wasn’t for downloading, the stores would have been able to survive better.”

Ferris said when the downloading wave first hit San Luis Obispo five years ago, Cheap Thrills lost 75 percent of its Cal Poly customers.

BooBoos has also experienced a decline.

“Overall, our sales remain steady, although our new CD sales are falling,” said John Huffman, also a co-owner of BooBoos Records.

In recent years, the floor space allotted to new CDs at BooBoos has been reduced and replaced with more used CDs, DVDs, clothes and other accessories.

White said the problem is complicated and multifaceted.

“There are bands putting albums out that only have one good song on them,” he noted. “How do you expect a kid to come in and spend $15, $16 on an album, and it’s only got one good song?”

Despite the popularity of downloading online, Huffman said there’s still a demand for CDs.

“I think you’d be surprised at how many people still buy CDs,” he said, adding that although the MP3 revolution does detract from sales of new release CDs, the store isn’t losing a profit because they have more customers now than ever.

Huffman said an individual customer who used to buy 10 CDs a year now buys four or five, but the profit is still maintained because instead of having 1,000 customers, they have around 1,500 customers.

“So now, more people buy less CDs,” he said.

For BooBoos, the Internet has become more of a friend than a foe in recent years.

“We have developed an online business in the last two or three years,” Huffman said. “We sell through Amazon and eBay and some of the other sites, so we’ve managed to expand our audience that way, too.”

As far as the future of the industry goes, Huffman said it’s hard to tell.

“It’s funny because people still come in and ask for cassettes,” he said. “And that’s 20 years after the fact. . . I don’t know that it’ll move a lot further away from physical product.”

In recent years, record labels have found ways to add value to the physical product by including a discounted DVD bonus or offering free MP3 downloads with the purchase of the CD.

Huffman said the value that comes with owning an album is what keeps customers coming back.

“There’s still a lot of people out there that like physical product,” he said. “They want the booklet. They want to put it in their library.”

Furthermore, the sound quality of a CD’s audio file is far better than that of an MP3, which is compressed to 1/10 the size of a CD file.

“Most of us can live with that when we’re going for a jog with our iPod,” Huffman said. “But when you’re listening to it in your house, you can tell the difference significantly.”

Despite the decline BooBoos has seen in CD sales, they have also seen up-kicks in other products like turn-tables, headphones, clothing, vinyl and tickets, which has kept them thriving.

Cheap Thrills has also offers more than just music by combining the record store with a comic book store.

“If you look at Cheap Thrills today, it’s definitely a different store than it was five years ago and 10 years ago,” Ferris said. “And I imagine five years from now we’ll be different yet again as we try to figure out how to make it all work.”

“For the first time ever, we had hotels calling us with availability,” said Lindsey Miller, marketing director at the chamber of commerce. “Usually they sold out in January.”

According to Miller, occupancy was down six percent in June, and when tourism is down, locally-owned shops feel the impact.

“Traveling is the first thing you cut; it’s kind of a frivolous expenditure,” Miller said.

Tourism is what keeps some businesses – like downtown boutique French Quarter – thriving over the summer months when students are gone.

“I think it helps that it’s a tourist city,” said Brittney Durr, a sales associate at French Quarter. “If we didn’t have any tourism, we wouldn’t really have any income (in the summer).”

For Amnesia, a locally-owned shop on Higuera street which sells exotic sculptures and collectibles – tourism also kept summer sales booming.

“Our summer was good definitely because foreign tourists – a lot of Germans and British – could spend money,” manager Deborah Hobbs said.

Although Hobbs said it’s hard to tell what direct effect the country’s economic situation has on her store, she has seen a cutback in expensive items being sold.

“Inexpensive items- people spend money on all the time. They’ll let themselves buy $5 earrings,” Hobbs said.

But expensive collectibles, like their Indonesian sculptures that go for $125 each, don’t sell anymore.

Hobbs said sales to students are down about 30 percent from average, but students are still buying clothes.

“They see clothes as a necessity,” she said. “Money doesn’t stop them.”

Kourtney Kaney, the retail keyholder at downtown clothing store Crazy Jays, said she observed the same trend; clothing is seen as a necessity, not a luxury. She said students aren’t as pressed to save because they’re spending their parents’ money.

“It’s been slow to a certain extent,” she said. “Because our prices are cheap and affordable, there’s not as much of an impact.”

When asked how the economic situation changed his shopping habits, industrial technology junior and downtown shopper Connor Mcminimee held up his shopping bag.

“I went to Ross,” he said, noting that he’d usually shop at someplace higher-end, like Men’s Warehouse.

Although he browsed the racks at Urban Outfitters, he walked out empty-handed.

“It’s been rough,” Mcminimee said. “Especially because I’m from out of state, so the transportation costs have gone up really high, tuition even went up. The pinch is on.”

He said he’s made the biggest cuts on food and driving to compensate for higher prices.

“There was a line of students out the door of Ross today, so I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one,” Mcminimee said.

While the economy is seen as a temporary drawback, Hobbs said the looming problem will come next year when stores have to relocate during seismic retrofitting of old downtown buildings.

“If the economy keeps going down, we certainly won’t be able to come back and pay more rent,” she said. “It’s uncertain, very very uncertain.”

Owner Jono Hicks of start-up clothing store Coalition said it helps that San Luis Obispo doesn’t have many major chain stores to detract from local businesses.

“Downtown San Luis has a pretty amazing mix of international, big-box type retailers like Gap and Banana Republic and Urban Outfitters; it mixes really well with your small, local retailers,” he said.

Jono doesn’t regret his decision to open the store.

“We knew when we were opening that there was going to be a lot of increased competition and that things were a little off with the economy already, so it wasn’t a huge surprise,” he said.

Many downtown storeowners were reluctant to discuss the economy’s impact on their businesses.

“In San Luis, a lot of these are small business owners, so it’s their livelihood,” Miller said.

Overall, San Luis Obispo is faring well compared to surrounding tourism hotspots like Monterey and Santa Barbara, she added.

“I think one of the things that really helps us is that we’re more of an affordable destination,” Miller said. “I think San Luis has definitely not been hit nearly as hard as other areas have. People are still coming, people are still living here.”

At its retreat next month, the chamber of commerce will discuss ways to help boost local business if the economic situation doesn’t improve, Miller said.

Six years ago, before liberal arts engineering studies senior Bill Trammel became a Cal Poly student, he had an epiphany while sitting at his mahogany desk at home.

“What would this desk look like if Q from James Bond designed it?” he asked himself.

He pictured a desk with a sliding screen, a finger print recognition system and video conferencing – all from his single, sedentary unit of space.

“But the key point is that it would look like a completely ordinary desk,” Trammel said, and the idea for his senior project was born.

Now, years later, he’s finally turning his vision into a reality.

Although something as high-tech as finger print recognition isn’t in his plans yet, the concept of an electromechanical desk controlled by buttons has kept Trammel and three classmates spending all their free time working out of a garage in San Luis Obispo for the past two months.

The team is designing furniture that treats computers as a crucial part of the structure, rather than an accessory to plop onto it.

“Assimilating people’s physical environment and their technological, computing environment hasn’t happened yet,” Trammel said.

The basic idea is that people can have the ability to own both a desk and computer, and use both at the level at which they’re supposed to be used.

The design would allow LCD flat screen monitors to retract within the desk when the monitor is not in use. A swivel panel would allow the back of the computer tower to be accessed without having to pull the entire appliance off the shelf.

A sliding panel within the desk, built by LAES junior Ryan Inouye, will house the keyboard.

All the electromechanical actions will be controlled through buttons at the edge of the desk.

“Basically what we’d be doing is creating desks with a series of mechanisms installed in them that can handle whatever computer system that they have, as long as it’s a flat screen,” Trammel explained.

The concept is derived from structures already prevalent in homes of celebrities and in major casinos.

“The technology is all already out there,” Trammel said. “It just hasn’t been applied in home office or in an executive and personal environment.”

Trammel said the way desks and computers function together traditionally isn’t ideal; when people want to use their desk, they usually have to move the keyboard and wires out of the way.

“If you have your computer always available, your productivity goes down about 50 percent, at least for me,” he said.

When a person can put the computer away, instead of having it always available on top of the desk, Trammel predicted productivity will go up.

“When it’s out of sight and out of mind – it doesn’t damage your productivity,” Trammel said.

The eventual goal is to create a company, since neither the technology nor furniture industries have made the transition yet.

“You kind of have to start from scratch,” Trammel said. He predicted that if a furniture company tried to incorporate the concept into their work, they would damage the customer loyalty they’ve built up for years.

“The industry is small enough that there’s less barriers of entry for someone to come in and make an integrated design company,” he added.

Based on Trammel’s informal surveys, the product seems to be popular.

“When I tell people about it I usually get two reactions,” Trammel said. “One, ‘Can I buy one right now?’ or, ‘Yeah, and-’ and they come up with another idea.”

LAES junior and project co-designer MJ Robotham said he was originally skeptical about the concept.

“At first when he started talking about desks, I was kind of speechless, like, ‘Really? Desks?’” Robotham said.

But after he understood the huge business potential, he has dedicated his time to turning the idea into an eventual business.

Ryan Alba, an LAES senior who is helping with the project, said he knew from the start that he wanted to be involved.

“I knew Bill and MJ from last year, and I’ve seen Bill’s leadership skills and I know anything he does is going to be a great, great experience,” Alba said.

Plus, he’s learning skills that will eventually help him establish his own start-up.

“Apart from the design part – which I love – I learn a lot from the business side of it,” he said. “I want to be an entrepreneur, that’s what my parents do.”

Last week, the group got their automation control equipment and plans to have a bulk of the mechanical work done by Thanksgiving.

The final prototype will be completed by Dec. 12 for a business plan competition.