Athletic Fee vote postponed

A controversy is rising between the graduates and the undergraduates as to which Athletic fee increase proposal to accept.

As of last week, the Athletic Association (AA) presented two different proposals to increase the revenue received from the student body to aid the near bankrupt AA.

The first proposal is to raise students' athletic fee across the board by 75 percent or 96 dollars per year. The second proposal is to increase the athletic fee by 20 dollars per semester, but charge 100 dollars for football home tickets and 100 dollars for home ACC basketball tickets.

The second proposal was presented right before the Mandatory Student Fee Allocation Committee was supposed to vote on whether or not to increase the Athletic fee for the student body.

The vote was postponed because the undergraduate members wanted time to review each proposal before making a decision. A resolution was passed in the house during the Jan. 16 Undergraduate House of Representatives (UHR) meeting stating that the AA did not provide enough information in their presentation and did not reveal how they would be reducing the cost.

The final version of the resolution simply stated that UHR did not have enough information to make a "sound and reasonable argument."

During that house meeting, some representatives acknowledged the fact that having to pay for tickets would reduce the attendance numbers at the games.

After a week of reviewing the proposals, UHR presented another resolution during the Jan. 23 meeting that stated the UHR was "respectfully urging the undergraduate members of the Mandatory Student Fee Allocation Committee to vote in favor of Option I," where Option I was the first AA proposal consisting "of a $48 increase in the Fall and Spring Athletic Fees, respectively."

The resolution also nullified the resolution that passed the previous week.

On the graduate side, according to Mitch Keller, graduate student body president, during his report of the president in the Jan. 23 meeting of the Graduate Student Senate (GSS), the graduates are in favor of the second option.

The graduates main point of contention against the original proposal was that graduate students do not have time to attend the sporting events, so why should they pay a dramatic increase in fees to pay for the sports.

During the Nov. 16 AA presentation to the graduate students regarding the Athletic fee, several graduate students brought up the option of a reduced Athletic fee that is currently in existence at other universities. However, in order to give the reduced rate to graduate students, the AA would have to levy a higher fee increase from the only other source of student funding: the undergraduates.

According to Alison Graab, the undergraduate student body president, the second proposal ticket prices were calculated by taking the reduced Athletic fee and, based on last year's attendance rates, figuring out the price each student would have to pay to make up the balance of the 4 million dollars that the AA wants to receive from the student body.

Keller admitted during the Jan. 23 GSS meeting that the undergraduates responded negatively to the second proposal, though the second proposal would be more beneficial to the graduate students.

The Mandatory Student Fee Allocation Committee is set to vote on the proposals either Monday or Wednesday next week.

During Monday's meeting, the Mandatory Student Fee Allocation Committee increased the Health fee by four dollars per year, the Technology fee by three dollars per year and the Transportation fee by one dollar per year.