Like the pedals on an exercise bike, the tension at last
night’s A.S. Council meeting rose and fell repeatedly as councilmembers probed
an administrator about the merits of the RIMAC Annex, which broke ground last
month and is scheduled to open in about a year.

Sports Facilities Director Don Chadwick visited the council
to “clarify the process” that led to the facility’s construction after the
council passed an amendment last week designed to more closely tie the
expenditure of student fees on any new facility with a student advisory board.

The council’s discussion of the amendment last week was
largely framed in the context of the annex, which some councilmembers said was
a misuse of recreational fees, since the annex is slated to include a cafe and
a convenience store but not workout equipment.

“It might seem that we didn’t take time to consider student
input,” Chadwick said last night, with Athletic, Recreation and Sports Facility
Board co-Chair Daniel Palay at his side. “We’re here to tell you that that is
not only untrue, [but] it couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

According to Chadwick, when RIMAC Arena first opened its
doors in 1994, it lacked much of the conference room and food service space
that was called for in the facility’s original plans. The annex, which will
incur an estimated $8.6 million in construction costs, will rectify the
deficiencies, he said.

At issue was the use of student recreational fees to finance
the facility’s construction. What ensued after Chadwick’s introduction was
nearly two hours of semantics warfare, which led the participants to
inconclusively confront the definition of “recreation.”

Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs Long Pham
bemoaned the use of the fees to build socializing space and said that a fee
reduction would be a wiser use of the funds used to construct the annex.

“I view the cafe and the convenience store as being
supportive of our mission to provide healthy, physically-active lifestyles here
on campus,” Chadwick said. “We’ve attended a lot of expos about how other
health stores are structured. We plan to have a lot of that kind of food
featured.”

He continued to say that an activity room with a rotating
schedule will also allow for low-impact exercise such as yoga, answering Pham’s
question about the relationship between the annex and recreation.

Earl Warren College Senator Peter Benesch argued that the
annex was not in keeping with the intent of the referendum that created the
recreation fee.

“When I pay my bill it says ‘rec fee’ and that’s building a
coffeehouse,” he said incredulously. “I think it’s a breach of contract.

With rising intensity, he then referred to plans for the
facility to include alcohol service.

“I don’t see how the beer and wine and the coffeehouse fits
into this,” he said.

But Palay noted that some of the food service would be
contracted out to third-party vendors.

“We are building the space,” he said. “We’re not putting the
keg in there.”

The debate ended unceremoniously when the council cut off
discussion on the matter to move on with its agenda.