ASMSU’s Student Assembly has posed a question to students: To build or not to build.
The undergraduate student government approved a bill Thursday which allocates $10,000 for a professional evaluation of the university’s intramural recreational facilities.
The preliminary assessment is one of the main steps in ASMSU’s initiative to possibly renovate the three IM buildings or construct a new student recreational facility.
“Basically, this is the starting point,” said Brent Beuschel, the Eli Broad College of Business representative for the assembly. “It determines whether the students feel there is a need to improve the IM facilities.”
To perform the assessment, ASMSU has contracted Brailsford and Dunlavey, a facility planning consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.
“These were people (who) were recommended to us by a lot of universities,” said Kendall Sykes, ASMSU Student Assembly chairperson. “They are the best people for the job.”
Sykes and Beuschel met and discussed the issue with Paul Brailsford, the company’s chief executive officer, while accompanying Rick McNeil, assistant director of Intramural Sports and Recreative Services, to the 2000 Athletic Business Conference in Orlando, Fla. last year.
The firm will send a three-person team on March 19 to perform the assessment, which is expected to last about three weeks.
“The process is fairly straight-forward so it goes pretty quick,” Brailsford said. “Our main goal is to root out the main problem of the project.”
Among the actions to be implemented by the group include an analysis of the IM buildings’ conditions and organizing focus groups to find out whether students feel improvements are necessary or not. Afterwards, the company would present an overall summary and recommendation to the student government.
A more permanent assessment, which conducts a campuswide survey, would be performed by the company if a majority of students agree with renovation.
Still, the evaluation comes almost two years after students first approached ASMSU officials with concerns about poor conditions in IM Sports-West.
“(The evaluation) is a very important piece of the puzzle (for the initiative),” said McNeil, who first approached the student government about improving the IM buildings last February. “If the assessment reveals that students don’t want improvements in the facilities, we will stop.”
