It’s been a long Friday. ASUO Vice President Nick McCain@@http://www.registerguard.com/web/opinion/28627950-47/students-student-force-project-emu.html.csp@@ hasn’t had time to eat since breakfast, so he orders a sandwich and strawberry smoothie from the counter in The Buzz. Jo Niehaus and Ian Needham@@correct@@ eye Nick’s smoothie. Meeting here is symbolic in a sense because it is the EMU that brought them all together.
These are three of the most influential and dedicated members of the EMU Task Force, a student group that has been trying for months to pass a referendum to renovate and expand the student union.
Two failed referendums, a hastily scrapped public relations campaign and more than 10 years of planning — all to replace a dilapidated student union in need of either roughly $12 million in maintenance or $135 million for a full renovation and expansion. The EMU, built in the 1950s, has become rundown, outdated and potentially dangerous and has left many students and members of the University of Oregon administration frustrated at the lack of progress.
“As a student, I didn’t understand why we have all these brand new facilities, but the student union building, which is supposed to be the heart of campus, was in the shape that it is,” McCain@@http://asuo.uoregon.edu/executive.php?a=12#toc28@@ said. “In my opinion, there are universities in the western region that aren’t on our level but have better student union buildings than we do. When the first referendum came out last year, I was in support of it.”
When McCain ran with Laura Hinman last March for ASUO Executive, they endorsed the expansion enthusiastically. The both of them eventually won that executive election, but the immense confusion and scandal surrounding the first ballot may have helped to kill the second EMU referendum.
“Laura and I both believe in renovating the EMU, and so through the summer just talking about what that would look like, we got heavily involved with Ian and Jo,” he said.
Niehaus and Needham had different reasons for getting involved.
“I didn’t want to be directly involved with ASUO,” Niehaus, assistant to the EMU director, said. “But I did want to be involved in student government. I thought the EMU was a really interesting aspect of that because it was such an important student space.”
She is currently the administrative assistant to Wendy Polhemus, interim director of the EMU@@http://vpsa.uoregon.edu/staff@@. Last March though, she was a vocal student lobbyist for the renovation project. She helped with student outreach, worked with architects to provide more information about the design and sat in on all the EMU Task Force meetings.
Needham became a student lobbyist for the expansion because he wanted to make an impact on campus. He felt that working for the student union was one way to do it.
“I think the most interesting aspect of the EMU is that students are given public control,” Needham said. He started out as the EMU budget chair, and this year became the EMU board chair, along with serving as an ASUO senator.
McCain, one of three student representatives on UO President Michael Gottfredson’s select committee, is still deeply involved with the project. Niehaus and Needham have largely been left out.
Ideas to renovate and expand the student union building have been around since at least 1995, after an exhaustive facility condition analysis of the building was conducted and found that sections of the building had nearly reached the end of their life cycle.
“The EMU opened in 1950,” Niehaus said. “The infrastructure from the ’50s is still in here, and it’s at the end of its useful life. For us to go back and replace all that within this current building is so expensive.”@@http://emu.uoregon.edu/@@
Just how expensive? The 1995 report estimated that the building required more than $6.6 million in maintenance at the time. That maintenance was deferred and has grown to between $10.9 million and $15.2 million (when adjusted for inflation).
While plans were drawn up and designs considered, maintenance fell to Dana Winitzky, director of facilities for the EMU.@@http://yourvoice.uoregon.edu/About.aspx@@
“He does a great job,” Needham said. “He does almost all the work with a small creative team of three to four people. They do a lot of work in-house, and in general, he has to do things to save money.”
Serious plans for a full renovation were jump-started in 2002, after Winitzky commissioned another facility condition assessment. The findings were bleak.
“While the building is well-maintained, many finishes and enclosure systems are worn to the point of near failure,” the assessment reported. “Additionally, there are significant aspects of the building that do not comply with current code and could endanger building occupants.”
That was more than 10 years ago.
Since then, the UO has been steadily working on designs for a new EMU. According to McCain, students have had a great deal of influence in the planning stages. But during the referendums, opponents claimed there was not enough student involvement and that students were not given enough voice in the process. Niehaus disagreed.
“For all of us to sit here and say there isn’t enough student input is discrediting 10 years of student input, 10 years of recognized need, 10 years of deferred maintenance,” she said.
In the summer of 2011, plans for the EMU were nearing completion. The administration decided it was time to go ahead with the renovation.
While the majority of the student body and faculty were on vacation, the administration tried to impose a fee to fund the EMU and Student Recreation Center renovations. When the ASUO executives Ben Eckstein and Katie Taylor found out what the administration was aiming at, they went to Salem to lobby the State Board of Higher Education for a student vote on the fee.
“The referendum exists because Eckstein made it happen,” Needham said. “I may complain about a lack of student involvement in certain situations, but we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him guaranteeing that students have a right to say how their money is spent.”
Approval was given — just barely — but only because it was understood the UO would present the fee as a vote in the fall to students.
There would be a referendum, but the administration’s unsuccessful attempt to push the EMU project through without a vote over the summer put the project in a bad position.
Now, student leaders were given the impression that the administration was being underhanded and arrogant. The legitimacy of the project was undermined before it began.
The first referendum was planned for October — but did not go well at all. Niehaus remembers it vividly.
“I was in the middle of helping (Outdoor Program coordinator) Dan Geiger get information together for a town hall kind of meeting where students could meet with architects working on the EMU,” she said. “I remember looking at my Twitter that day and seeing the Daily Emerald had reported the referendum had been postponed for the EMU.”@@http://pages.uoregon.edu/dgeiger/@@
The task force believes that Eckstein and Katie, while valiant in their move to take student ownership of the EMU renovation, fell flat in the actual campaign to students.
“That was the first time the referendum got moved back,” she said. “I felt like the executive had made bad decisions without consulting any key stakeholders including student groups involved in the EMU and EMU board members. I was outraged.”
Another referendum was held in March and put on the ballot but failed again, 52 percent opposed, which brought the expansion plans to a full stop. Nothing more could be done for the rest of the year.@@http://projects.registerguard.com/web/newslocalnews/27278749-41/student-students-project-eckstein-million.html.csp@@
Then, things got even worse during the summer of 2012. According to Task Force members, what happened next was well intended, and it wasn’t their intention to mislead anyone.
Feeling frustrated with the lack of progress, the Task Force sought out Winitzky and Polhemus about hiring an outside consulting firm to help create a winning campaign. They took the idea up through the ranks of the administration until it reached Vice President of Student Affairs Robin Holmes@@correct@@, who took charge of the new project and began working with the Task Force.
“I think Robin trusted us as student leaders to make the right choices about pushing through something that we feel passionate about because it’s our building, not something we were told to do,“ Niehaus said.
Holmes contracted RBI Strategies and Research, a PR firm with past experience that included the Obama campaign.
“It was a completely fresh, outside perspective, and they could teach us and give us tools to learn how to campaign to people who were not ready to hear about the same issues all over again,” Niehaus said.
RBI came in over the summer. Their plans focused on getting “50 percent plus one” of the student vote and advocated giving out free merchandise to raise support for the renovation.
However, RBI’s involvement was picked up by the watchdog website UO Matters, which criticized Holmes for attempting to co-opt students’ votes with a flashy campaign and wasting UO money. The Register-Guard published several articles about the referendum, which pushed the issue to a state-wide audience.
A letter signed by 14 student leaders at the UO, including ASUO Sens. Ben Bowman and Lamar Wise, was sent to the state board denouncing the campaign, saying that the administration should have remained neutral in referenda for a project they had already tried to push through before without student votes.
On August 21, the UO canceled their contract with RBI and began distancing themselves from the PR campaign.  In her email to the state board, Holmes said, “Students and others were correct and appropriate in raising this as a concern.”
However, $17,000 had already been paid to RBI for a campaign that would never run. Niehaus regrets the whole affair but says the money came out of the EMU, not students’ pockets.
“It all came from EMU revenue,” she said. “It wasn’t student money at all. That was another rumor.”
So now the EMU renovation is on hold. Life continues as normal, and the building continues to wear down.
The task force’s main strategy now is to find ways to lower the cost of the renovation without gutting the designs. Needham is particularly frustrated over how students and the EMU board have been treated.
“It’s interesting,” he said. “We talk about how much control we have and how much input we have, and I don’t know if it’s just sidestepped or glossed over constantly. I mean, the president has a committee to decide the future of the building and not one union board member is on it. How did that even … I mean, even the director of the EMU has no voice in it.”
McCain still supports the plan. He believes that he and Laura will be able to hold a third referendum. Niehaus is optimistic. She thinks as long as the price can come down, the referendum can pass a student vote.
“Right now, I think the only issue is the fee,” Niehaus said. “I want to give us a building we deserve, our student groups deserve. We’re lagging behind the Pac-12 schools. We’re lagging behind our own athletic department.”
It’s getting late. It’s Friday evening, and everyone is tired from a long week. For these students, who have poured so much of their energy into the expansion project, the current situation is deeply disappointing.
Niehaus sums it up:
“We keep hoping that someday people will recognize this building needs to be improved, and it just hasn’t happened.”