University Apartment Community Center Meeting Minutes – 04/12/07

Mr. Ramesh Sagili, Vice President, welcomed everyone to the meeting. He conducted the meeting in the absence of President Venkat Goruganti due to medical reasons. He expressed happiness at the attendance being larger than usual.

Mr. Ron Sasse, Director of Residence Life, offered everyone laundry bags which were left-over gifts for incoming freshmen. He said that there are plans to relocate the university apartments from the land near Hensel Park. He said there are discussions going on about changes to this area. The first of a four-phase plan was the construction of new apartments. The location of these apartments was not fixed yet but they were currently looking at the area near Texas Avenue. The Board of Regents had the final authority and they were looking into the matter. Currently, everything is in the concept stage.

Regarding cable and internet, he said that they were initially not aware of the seriousness of the issue due to very small number of complaints.

Mr. Dan Mizer, Associate Director of Residence Life, informed residents that the College View apartments had been re-cabled last year.

Dr. Walt Magnussen, Director of Telecommunications, informed residents that they had received the “go-ahead” on rewiring the apartments. He said that the current cables were old and introduced noise into the cable plant, thus reducing performance. This noise is propagated through the entire system and hence it is necessary to completely change them. He said all required materials were on order and a bid for the labor contract would be out ASAP. Most of the work needed would occur outside apartment buildings, and that a portion of the rewiring would have to be done inside as well. He mentioned the technicians could possibly rewire a building per day, and that improvements in the signal may not be apparent until the entire re-cable work is complete. He also stated other improvements such as switching from one channel to two channels were being done to improve the performance. In reply to a resident’s question as to expected date of completion for the entire work, Dr. Magnussen informed that the target date was the 3^rd of June. 

In response to a resident’s question regarding cost of telephone service to the residents, Dr. Magnussen and Mr. Michael Krenz, Assistant Director of Residence Life, responded that it costs about $8/phone line/month. The resident then referred to the proposed budget by DRL and asked why the re-cabling had been put off so late when the cost was a fraction of the yearly cost of maintenance. Mr. Willis Marti, Associate Director of Networking, CIS, responded that the cost of the cable TV and internet, as calculated by the resident, included other components apart from the cables. He said that a major chunk of the cost was due to the programming costs. Further discussion on this topic was deferred.

Mr. Marti said that the current upgrades would result in doubling of the bandwidth available at UA. In response to residents’ queries, Dr. Magnussen said that this improvement would make the service better than SuddenLink’s service.

Mr. Tom Swanner, Senior Information Technology Manager, asked residents to continue calling in the CIS Help Desk in the event of problems. They also offered to look into certain specific issues with individual residents who had raised their concerns.

Mr. Jesse Johnston, Manager of Apartment Facilities, advised that roads in the area were being fixed and potholes filled. He stated that the roads get bad due to the use of buses. He also answered questions regarding wiring of exhaust fans in the Avenue A restrooms.

Elections were held for the UACC executive board positions for the next year. The following were elected:

Raghu Jana, President

Bikram Sharda, Vice President

Salah Ali, Vice President for Information Technology

Ruth Amutha, Vice President for Programs

It was announced that the positions of VP-Finance and VP-Publicity were still open since there were no contenders for these positions.

Residents raised issues regarding specific items on the budget proposed by DRL. With specific regard to the Debt Service item on the budget, a resident said that extremely high interest rates of over 16% were being paid on the debts and that this in turn hurt the present residents. He said that some other methods of raising the money for construction should have been looked into. DRL officials responded that they were not sure how the resident arrived at the figure of 16% and offered to provide detailed breakdown of all the components for further clarity in the matter. It was decided to hold a separate meeting to discuss budget issues and to send pertinent questions to DRL before-hand in order to enable them to provide specific answers.

There was discussion about apartment quality as raised by a resident who had to move due to flooding of their apartment. The residents asked DRL to ensure that an apartment was habitable and would not be affected by weather before renting it out. Mr. Sasse and Mr. Paul Obiazi, Resident Manager, said that the faulty apartment in question was being fixed. Mr. Sasse offered the resident an alternate apartment unit to move into if it made them more comfortable.

The meeting ended with Mr. Sagili thanking everyone for attending.