Students may lose seats at football and basketball games next year if cost-saving measures under negotiation by the Athletic Department Finance Committee and the Athletics Department are ratified, Senator Kevin Day said on Wednesday during the Student Senate meeting.
The proposed changes call for students to trade their current seats in Section Nine, located near the marching band at the west side of Autzen Stadium, for seats in Section Four. The swap would result in a loss of 400 seats, Day said.
Students would also lose half of their current seats in the third balcony of McArthur Court under the new terms.
Day said the reductions would help address the no-show factor — a recurring problem caused by students who get free tickets to games and don’t use them.
“It didn’t seem economically right to keep those seats for the cost long term,” Day said.
Groups whose budgets are under review by the EMU Board of Directors will have to wait until the end of the budget process to learn if they will gain money for growth because of an accounting error in the spreadsheets used to determine the board’s benchmarks, Senator Toby Hill-Meyer said during the meeting.
Hill-Meyer said the projected benchmark has dropped from about 9.2 percent to about 3.8 percent since EMU Director Dusty Miller notified an EMU Board member of the error over winter break. The benchmark could fluctuate further, although the board will try to stay within the current guideline, Hill-Meyer said.
Senate Ombudsman Stephanie Erickson announced that two students filed grievances against the Oregon Commentator this week because of content published in its recent issues. One unidentified student filed a grievance last week against the conservative journal of opinion.
Erickson said she turned the grievances over to the ASUO Executive because the Senate will need to approve the Programs Finance Committee’s budget recommendations for The Commentator, which could be a conflict of interest.

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