Originally published April 10, 2011 at 7:09 p.m., updated April 10, 2011 at 7:09 p.m.
KUnited creates new platform for dining options
As part of its effort to increase student involvement in campus decisions, the KUnited coalition is including a campus dining option as part of its platforms.
The campus dining platform is student body president candidate Libby Johnson and vice president candidate Gabe Bliss’s effort to allow students to choose which restaurants and dining options they’d like to see on campus, a system they call “choose what you eat.”
“It’s really important that students get that input,” Bliss, a sophomore from Olathe, said. “This gives them the ability to tweak what they want to see in the dining options on campus, and puts them in partnership with KU Dining.”
Johnson, a senior from Lawrence, said that this platform would start the creation of a KU Dining board, which would involve the KU Dining administration, the All Scholarship Hall Council, the Association of University Residence Halls and representatives from the student body.
Together, the board would evaluate what campus dining is like, what could be improved and what students would like to see.
“Basically, students would be able to pick what they want to eat on campus,” Johnson said. “Whether it’s Quizno’s, Chipotle or a local business, then they would have that option.”
Because KU Dining has administration throughout campus, Johnson and Bliss said that KU Dining board would be able to have input about the dining experience in different areas on campus, including in the dorms, in the Underground and in the KU Memorial Unions.
Johnson said the coalition spoke with representatives of KU Dining to see if the platform was a plausible option that could make an effect on student involvement in dining decisions. She said the response from KU Dining was positive.
“The key part is that students would be in the decision making process,” Johnson said.
Renew KU hopes to ease congestion in the Underground with new dining options at the Kansas Union
In an effort to decrease traffic in the Underground, the Renew KU coalition included a movement for stronger dining options in the Kansas Union.
This campus dining platform is student body president candidate Casey Briner and vice president candidate Josh Dean’s effort to make the Kansas Union a more central campus hub. Even though the Kansas Union is farther from most campus buildings than the Underground, Dean, a sophomore from Overland Park, said he believed that introducing new restaurants in the building would make a significant change in the number of students who would choose to dine at the Union.
“For the platform to really work, we need something that the students overwhelmingly want,” Dean said. “Food is a powerful motivator.”
So far, Briner, a junior from Flower Mound, Texas, and Dean said they were in the process of determining which restaurants they would like in the Union. The two said they had received feedback from a couple of hundred students through casual conversations and brainstorming, but that they hadn't heard from enough students to decide which restaurants would be present in the building.
Briner said the new restaurants would be similarly themed to the current restaurants that are in the Union. The two talked to David Mucci, director of the KU Memorial Unions corporation.
Mucci said that although introducing new restaurants to the Kansas Union is possible, there was no real way to tell if it would make the area more popular or successful.
He said that in order to receive a restaurant license for each new restaurant, the Union corporation would have to pay proceeds in excess of 11 percent of sales. He said that it was hard to tell if the volume of sales would increase enough to compensate this overhead.
“I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question to be raised by Renew KU,” Mucci said. “There’s just not a clear and obvious solution.”
According to Briner and Dean, the money to finance any change would come from the Memorial Unions corporations board budget, which would arrange contracts with the chosen restaurants.
Briner and Dean said they hope that students who had more time would be willing to travel to Union as a result of introducing new restaurants to the the Union. They also hope that new restaurants in the Union will decrease the congestion that often occurs in the Underground.
The change would take place in the 2012 school year, Dean said.
— Edited by Amanda Sorell and Samantha Collins
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