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Saturday, August 16, 2014

Westwood Relief?

I noted an article in the Daily Bruin that indicated that UCLA was "crowdsourcing" donations for folks who had their cars damaged in the recent water main flooding.  According to the spark.ucla.edu website, there is something called the Chancellor's Emergency Flood Relief Fund. The article says that the hope is to raise something in excess of $50,000 which apparently is intended to provide checks of a little more than $200 to each flood victim. [There is also a separate program of interest-free loans described in the article.]

Article at http://dailybruin.com/2014/08/15/ucla-to-offer-grants-loans-to-individuals-with-cars-damaged-in-flood/

Now yours truly is as charitable as the next guy - and actually donated a hundred bucks to the Fund.  But I did wonder whether somewhere in the UCLA budget there wasn't an extra $50,000 lurking that might have been used for this purpose.  

Of course, you could say that this was a smart move by the fundraising folks (although it may be that some of the $50,000 in small donations will ultimately be diverted from money that these folks would otherwise give to UCLA).  On the other hand, a flood is a terrible disaster to waste.  Nonetheless, yours truly - in thinking about this exercise in Westwood Relief - was reminded of the Pismo Beach Relief scene from the movie Clueless:

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