Sustainability

After conversing with the Sustainability Taskforce representative, it was apparent that the Taskforce had done extensive research and outside consulting to basically quantify all the issues concerning the school infrastructure and superstructure. These are fully included in two documents: Mitigation Strategies by Priority and GES_Trinity_College_Sustainability_Report. Strictly speaking, these documents quantify many aspects of sustainability which have been mentioned before by students. Any feedback on these would be great, especially as to which ones we should focus on and perhaps pressure the administration to adopt. Also, these documents were presented to the President himself, who said he would choose some of these to start now and to accomplish in long term. However, given the current economic crisis, he might find it difficult to commit to some of these expensive short-term but important long-term plans. That is probably where the students will come in.

Cashback

An idea which we had wanted to pursue was cashback, wherein people could use their debit cars to purchase items and then get cash back as an option after swiping. In the words of Chartwells itself, there are two reasons why this is not feasible: 1.The blackboard cash register system we have on campus  which is owned by the college is not able to facilitate this function.  2.  The bank we use will not allow us to do this, It is agaisnt thier policy.  However, I do not fully understand these reasons, and I will do more research on understanding these reasons and potentially finding mitigators for these reasons.

Gallows

As far as Gallows was concerned, we had decided the best course of action would be to install locknetics, which would make it secure and accessible to all students. It turns out that it would cost $4000 to do this, though Sally Katz would have no issue doing this once the funds were provided. It seems both that Jonathan Miller ( who was asked about this by Fabio) and Dean Alford (who we talked to via email) were not averse to this idea, but the main concern is the funding which we have not been able to secure because we were not sure of initial support for this project. We are currently considering how to approach this project, and any feedback would also be welcome.

Nutritionist

As far as the nutritionist is concerned, the search for one has begun, as Mr. Chenette has contacted both St. Joseph’s College and other RD. We will most likely have a nutritionist here, on a 20-hr basis, starting in the Spring semester.

Zipcars

Zipcars is being successful and will continue to be fully utilized here at college. The only loss that Zipcars currently experience is during the summer and winter, but that is to be expected as much fewer people are here. I wonder is there might be some way to mitigate the cost to the school during those months?

Infrastructure

Lastly, is there any issue which the infrastructure committee can address in the future? Please let us know.

Just wanted to say that the post office has been upgraded, and emails are now sent out when packages are processed instead of those little paper slips. I’m hoping this makes the campus a little less paper dependent and a little more modern as well as a bit more convenient. Thanks to Prez Grubin and VP Ramirez for helping me make this happen!

Renz.

Hey Senators and People in General,

Infrastructure is currently considering which residence halls have a serious lack of proper lighting. In other words, if the hallways and stairways are dark enough to have to be extremely careful to avoid injury, then that area needs to have lighting upgrades. I am requesting that anyone that knows of such a hallway or stairway to please report it.

Thanks.

Just wanted to let everyone know that the Infrastructure Committee has convinced facilities to install more ashtrays and cigarette snuffers around campus in concrete areas like in front of the library and near the Fred. This will help keep the campus somewhat cleaner.

For the third time, I met with a person from the administration to discuss the issue of PAC access to residence halls. Amy DeBaun, Director of Residential Life, explained the history of dormitory access here at Trinity, going from keys to codes to network cards. A disdainful but strong theme iterated during the code access period was once again the sharing of codes, for which there is actual data (not made available to me, except as a citation for the fact that every month tens of PAC’s are replaced). Actually, an interesting data point brought up was the fact that during code access, access was granted to an individual only for his/her own dormitory; only since the advent of network cards was it viable to allow students universal residence hall access (i.e. due to the very nature of the cards being networked). Thinking about it in this way, the PAC dorm hall access is sort of a step backwards. Taking it from the angle of safety, I pressed the point that a student losing their ID card would be very much at risk from all sorts of malevolent forces with no way to get to the safety of the dorms especially at late night, should such a terrible circumstance ever arise. A terse but admittedly adequate response to this concern was that such a student should simply call campus security, from either a personal phone or from the “safety phones” installed around campus (yellow poles). This would actually be quite a bit troublesome, but campus security is required to assist any student in getting in to their residence halls when such troubles arise. I cannot question this logic. A major aspect of this brought up was the financial requirements needed to even undertake the project. It cost the college quite a huge amount to actually install the card networks and to continue this takes quite some resources. However, the administration holds these costs justified due to the safety they seem to provide. To actually add PAC access to dorm would require eventually going to each dorm individually and programming all of them individually to the regular inhabitants and also to reprogram every year, on a manual basis. In this sense, the network cards are easier. In addition, with the financial tragedy that we are currently experiencing and the resultant cutbacks, no such action would be technically feasible. In summation, the administration has answered rejected this venture at all levels for myriad reasons, but mostly because they believe in the cards and refuse to implement PAC access to residence halls. There is apparently little that the student body can do to sway this opinion. At this point, I am currently marginalizing this issue, for I have met with all the top people in charge of these things, and also waiting for results from the student survey.

Recently, I met with Colleen E. Stewart who is in charge managing ACIS (Locknetics) at our college to discuss in depth the details of residence hall access, especially as relating to entry by code instead of simply ID card. Declaring that access by codes instead of ID card would not be enacted, she stated that the main reason for this had to do with security, to the loss of convenience. Apparently, until 2002, there had been exterior building access using codes as well as card readers with magnetic stripes. However, there had been many reports of people being reckless with codes and sharing them with others, including people not even in the school despite the warning that such actions were strictly inadvisable. One incident in particular cited was that of an individual who gave the code to a “beau” and ended up having that particular code revealed across campus to quite a few people (I am not revealing the specifics). It seems that one or a few people spoiled it for everyone. In support this, statistics were also revealed that about 20-25 codes are replaced/reset per month due to complaints of compromise and “mistaken sharing”. Of course, the idea of sharing codes on this level, since codes can actually simply be passed on by word of mouth, email, or text, is one that is completely unappealing. The ACIS manager said that one of the main reasons that ID cards are required is that they can not exactly be shared easily, since they require physical presence for the proximity reader to work not just a numerical code or any such thing. Needless to say, the inconvenience of the cards are also the safety of them. Secondarily, supposedly because of the ID system, Trinity College is ranked number 23rd safest of 135 colleges according to Reader’s Digest. This obviously not a ranking the school administration would like to lose. Thirdly, the ACIS manager also iterated that the reason for having ID cards supersedes simply dorm access as ID cards are necessary for very many different actions on campus, such as food, etc, and cannot consider reasons why a student would not have it on them. It seems that in some ways accidents are not excusable? But, the main point seems to be that making dormitory access to easy for students would be making it easier for a lot of other personages to access the dorms as well, through diverse methods mostly having to do with finding out codes. Upon the last word, the ACIS manager revealed that in the future the college plans to make access to other facilities and residence halls, perhaps even rooms, more exclusively by ID cards for students and faculty. I personally am not completely convinced of the reasons provided and will seek additional information from other sources. If additional clarification is needed, please contact me as all the info presented to me is not necessarily present here.

The SGA Campus Infrastructure Committee recently looked into why students cannot access dorms by simply entering their code on the dorms access pads, which every dorm has but seems to be unused in any case. I spoke with the Facilities Department (Buildings and Grounds)about the addition of this feature, as a supplement to ID card access due to possible accidents like simply forgetting one’s card and then having no way to enter dorms except through other people. The Facilities Department indicated that they would not under any present conditions allow code access to dorms for several reasons which include the following: key codes are often shared and would compromise security; ID cards allow the security to check exactly everyone who enters a dorm and thus would promote positive regulation; key code access is generally chaotic for administrative reasons. In short, the Facilities Department rejects this idea. The committee has decided that the issue is not crucial enough for insistence. Does anyone care to press this issue further?