Present: Alexander Dean, Pete Donnelly, Mark Fuller, Justin Glavis-Bloom, Jimmy Kaplowitz, Katie Lamm, Damian Maldonado, Micheal Morgenstern, James Reed, Evan Stone, Christine Sunu, Laura Supkoff

Absent: Adam Axler, Sri Kalyanaraman (absence excused on Nov 07, 2006)

Tardy: Thea Hinkle, Allison Kwong

Guest: Richard Bova

1. Program house review Monday night the day before election day
1. a. Adding another level of incentive for houses who are doing positive things
2. b. Discussing this with Program House council and Greek council
2. BURP in the lounge as an event?
1. a. Is this a slippery slope?
2. b. What about organizing other groups?
3. c. What is necessary to be done at an event?
4. d. Something could be considered for next semester --> where can the line be drawn?
5. e. Most likely a case by case issue --> if people have questions they should ask the Program House chair ahead of time?
6. f. Can this be considered case by case?
7. g. There is a subjective clause in our new guidelines for program house events
3. Cooking House storage issues
1. a. They want a large lockable storage cabinet
2. b. House wants combination lock on cabinet with combination given to Residential Life
3. c. Recap of last week—Cooking House has lots of cooking equipment that is expensive and cannot be stored in the kitchen in its current state
4. d. Res Life does not usually allow locked cabinets or closets in program houses and it does not usually purchase equipment for program houses
5. e. Would ResLife or cooking house buy this cabinet?
6. f. If Cooking House could buy the cabinet, then it would eliminate the problem of Res Life purchasing equipment, and the only problem would be the locking.
7. g. Cooking House would remove the shelving that they currently have, and replace it with the cabinet?
8. h. Motion to allow Cooking House to keep a lockable closet in their kitchen as long as Res Life is given access – motion passes unanimously
4. STORAGE
1. a. Smart Movers
1. 1. Vouchers were issued two years ago to Smart Movers
2. 2. There were no problems two years ago, but this past year, Smart Movers had grown astronomically and there were many problems and now many complaints about students with lost boxes
3. 3. $35-$40 thousand dollars for this storage comes from ResLife
2. b. Couldn’t ResLife do the storage itself?
3. c. Rich Bova: things cannot be stored in campus buildings
1. 1. Reason: liability issue—things could be stolen, or water damage could occur
2. 2. There were strange things left around in dorms, causing mold and rot, and people would return looking for things that they had left there a long time before
3. 3. Personnel was also an issue in terms of the time of storage and the time of pick up. The expectation was that there would be staffing 7 days a week
4. 4. Couldn’t people store things in their closets like some do over winter break?—no, there are summer students that come and stay here, plus the liability issues
4. d. The university owns the property on Gano street that could potentially be used as a storage area—potentially it has the capacity for the type of storage we need
1. 1. The university would have to pay for and organize the transfer of student items to the storage space
2. 2. ResLife would have to rent the space from the university in this building and then they would have to pay to staff it, but Dean Bova thought that he would be able to undercut the cost of U-Hall or some other service.
5. e. How would the issues of damage and liability be alleviated?
1. 1. This area is not a moldy basement, it is meant to store things
2. 2. They can get insurance for it
3. 3. ResLife would not be expected to pay for the entire thing—simply subsidized
6. f. If this is cheaper, and this is close to campus, people will most likely use it
7. g. ResLife doesn’t need to make a profit, so the service could be offered to people cheaper/li>
8. h. The issue of hiring people for that month is still a potential issue—if people want to work 40 hours, they would already have a full time job
9. i. The time table is during exams
10. j. Consensus is that we would like to see this happen, but what would we do about the current system?
11. k. People don’t want to get rid of the storage option
12. l. Benefit for individuals versus benefit for everyone overall—individual vouchers could only be given to individuals, but the new system could benefit everyone by reducing the fees for everyone
13. m. CS students might be helpful in this process
14. n. Will ResLife be good at dealing with storage, as opposed to housing issues which is ResLife’s specialty?
15. o. Potentially there is a benefit to getting people to go in storage locker groups as opposed to storing each box individually
16. p. There is no storage area that is big enough for all Brown students
17. q. Ideally you’d want to have one provider that Brown could partner with
18. r. Possibly get another group to come in and provide the infrastructure and we provide the storage location
19. s. There is a certain amount of money, how do we think it should be used to utilize storage
20. t. The Gano street facility is large, but it is already mostly filled with other departments
21. u. Concerns related to what will happen if Gano facility is utilized
1. 1. If this is already mostly full, will it even benefit everyone?
2. 2. Not everyone will ever be using storage
3. 3. If you open this up to everybody, it would end up being about $5-$10 dollars
4. 4. Don’t we know that only a minority of students will be using this?
5. 5. When you subsidize something, you create artificial demand—people are going to store here if it is cheaper
22. v. We can use this money to start a program, and we can serve as many people as we can, and you set a rate
23. w. Alternatively, because we gave subsidies, Smart Movers was on campus—something that other companies didn’t do—the existing system is another viable alternative if we find another company
24. x. It’s difficult to pick a company, not knowing what will happen

End of Meeting

Submitted by Laura Supkoff, 2006-2007