The Re-Assemble Assembly Hall Renovation Project Referendum Committee released more details regarding the Assembly Hall renovation to the Illinois Student Senate at their Wednesday meeting.
The project will take 30 years to finance, student trustee David Pileski said. Pileski answered many of the senate’s questions for presenters Claudia Christy and Preston Brown, chair and co-chair of the committee respectively.
Brown said the renovation bill will be $160 million and 17 percent of that, including interest, will come from Assembly Hall’s proposed $25-per-semester general fee, which will be voted on March 5-6. The petition, which did not mention that it would be a 30-year fee, received more than 3,300 signatures. Christy said the committee was not required to include this information by the Campus Student Elections Commission.
“We did what we needed to in order to get that on the petition,” Brown said. “We have had all the information available on the website and social media for individuals who were looking for it.”
As of Wednesday night, the Re-Assemble Assembly Hall website does not mention that this will be a 30-year fee.
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Jim Maskeri, senator and senior in LAS, asked for an itemized list of money spent on publicity, advertising, marketing and staff in order to support the referenda question, “in an effort to be as transparent as possible,” though the CSEC does not require this.
“To me, it personally seems like we’re using student fee money and resources of the campus to kind of buy a new fee, and I want to make sure that our student constituency knows exactly how much campus resources are actually being spent on this effort,” Maskeri said.
Pileski said signatures for petitions cannot be bought.
“I would like to know what did MTD do to get their petition signed?” he asked. “(Getting) signatures on a bus is somewhat ridiculous to me.”
If it is passed, Pileski said the Assembly Hall fee would not be voted on every four years because it will be a general fee, relating it to the ARC general fee students are currently paying.
Pileski was not able to provide the senate with an estimate of how much student fee money will go towards the project. He said because class sizes and the amount of credit hours that students take are variable, an estimate would be impossible to provide.
Tyler can be reached at [email protected].
