At its meeting Friday, the Associated Students UCLA Board of Directors could allocate a hefty sum of student fees to a wasteful and ultimately unnecessary renovation to an Ackerman Union staircase.
Additionally, the association’s five-year plan will not be finalized until the day of the meeting, preventing any meaningful student body input on the board’s plans for spending millions of dollars of student fees in future years.
As of the ASUCLA Finance Committee budget meeting on May 8, the board planned to allocate roughly $3 million towards improving Ackerman Union spaces. Some of these improvements are warranted, but about $1 million was slotted to go toward building a large new staircase in the union, connecting A-level with Level 1, near Panda Express.
While this board supports making improvements to the student union – as a student space, fees should go to its upkeep – we are concerned that using such a high volume of funds to fix something that is not broken would be exceptionally wasteful.
The purpose of this staircase would be to improve flow of traffic between the two levels, opening up the space in order to make the stores and facilities on the A-level more accessible and better utilized by students. The ultimate goal is to make Ackerman feel like a more open and welcoming space.
But, while its location is not central, there is already a staircase that connects those two levels in Ackerman, as well as two elevators. Allocating nearly a million dollars in student fees to create a nicer, more design-friendly version of something that already exists is pointless and irresponsible, especially considering ASUCLA’s deepening financial troubles.
At the end of a five-year forecast that includes all the planned renovations to Ackerman, ASUCLA’s ending cash book balance would go down by several millions of dollars. Keeping that money in the bank seems a far wiser decision for an institution still in millions of dollars of debt and struggling to stay afloat.
Moreover, this new design would likely take up the space currently occupied by the A-level Post Office Express. The loss of this post office would be particularly damaging to the actual purpose of a student union, which is to provide necessary and easily accessible services to the student body.
Currently, the precise details for this plan have not been finalized, and the financial forecast will not be complete or available to the public until just before the start of the meeting on Friday. With so much student money involved, this timeline lacks transparency and is concerning given the lack of time for student input.
With millions of dollars in play, students deserve more of a voice on whether they want their money spent on fixing something that’s not broken.
If the board of directors is concerned with serving students as it should be, it must be sure to actively seek student input in future years. For now, its best move is to avoid wasteful spending and abandon the plan to build a million-dollar staircase to nowhere.