By: Alex Sorondo/ Staff Writer
Shortly before Sanjeev Udhnani’s, vice president for Student Government Council at Modesto Maidique Campus, simultaneously reassuring and disheartening Q&A regarding student frustration with the University’s shuttle system, Connor Mautner, executive assistant for SGC-MMC, gave the most endearing and ambitious presentation of the semester.
He proposed a $40 million solar power initiative for the University. Mautner, a freshman, has been researching the project since June, and initially presented it to the Senate, when running for housing senator at the start of the semester.
He lost the position by a narrow margin, only to then be hired on the spot as SGC-MMC President O’Keefe’s assistant.
The plan is brilliant and refreshingly transparent, and in talking about it among friends, I find myself dishing with sincerity the campus cliché of how this will finally put the University on “the map.”
Mautner consulted experts, compared prices, looked over school funds, analyzed financial risks and potential gains, even evaluated the national climate of solar energy in world universities. His research showed that Florida Gulf Coast University currently has the largest solar garden of any university in the world.
The solar garden he is lobbying for the University would be about 400 percent larger than FGCU’s, occupying about 1.6 million square feet of unused roof space and would, over the course of four years, reclaim all of the University’s investment and, in the solar farm’s lifetime, save a gross of $300 million (a net of $260 million).
A pilot project on the roof of Primera Casa is currently being considered. The project is ambitious and, should the pilot prove functional and Mautner’s estimates feasible under closer scrutiny, I think it is a risk well worth taking.
This is the kind of innovation a university should strive for, and I can anticipate a surge of school spirit at the prospect of being the most power-efficient university in the world.
Mautner’s presentation was a much needed reprieve from the monotony of mid-semester inactivity, which will hopefully cease once senators have evaluated their mid-semester student surveys.
As slow as Monday’s meeting was though, SGC-MMC is again showing improvement. Professionalism is still somewhat lacking, as emphasized by the pervasive text messaging and–still, six weeks in–everybody’s bafflement with the protocol of amending a bill.
Toward the meeting’s end, senators reviewed the results of a student survey from the Week of Welcome, filled out by 312 students.
Complaints addressed the scheduling of the shuttle that carries students back and forth between MMC and Biscayne Bay Campus.
Udhnani took part in efforts toward restructuring the schedule, but found that any permutation of departures neglected a vital time slot and advancing one departure would require doing the same for each.
Adding another shuttle was considered. The shuttle we currently have, however, costs about $900,000 a year to operate, roughly $300,000 of which is covered by the $2.50 one-way tickets for each trip and the rest by the $80 Parking and Transportation fee tagged onto our tuition.
Thus, to add another bus would be to presumably double the tuition’s P&T fee.
On the basis that she could not take the shuttle to reach an early class in a previous semester, one senator suggested repeatedly that “we just add maybe like one more earlier shuttle” (her words, verbatim; repeatedly).
Otherwise, resolutions were sparse. Senators seemed to just accept the situation as a dead-end, which was sad and a bit frustrating to see. It was encouraging, though, that Udhnani had clearly looked into it quite closely.
Udhnani and Mautner provided for this week’s meeting an image of the SGC-MMC’s turn toward competence, or at least an eye toward it.
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