I believe the Varsity Theater project is not a good endeavor for the Government of the Student Body to undertake. The cost alone is staggering. A more than $400,000 commitment in this first bill for the first two years and an estimated $60,000 and growing investment each year after is a lot of money to provide movies a few times a week.

The Ames community already is home to a cheap theater. North Grand Mall has $2 movies on the weekends and cheaper the rest of the time. I understand this is not near campus, but all ISU students can hop on CyRide and be there fairly quickly.

Surely, GSB can come up with a better way to spend our student fees. A project that runs at a deficit should be a red flag that maybe it’s a bad idea. What would happen if the cost estimates are incorrect and the theater runs $100,000 yearly deficit? By the time the project would be shut down and scrapped, over half a million dollars in student fees will likely be spent to show a few thousand students some movies. This is just too big a risk to take.

It is my opinion that this is the pet project of a handful of GSB members. I was in attendance at a presentation given to the Engineering Student Council by a group of students who had apparently come up with this idea, and the students said the idea had yet to be brought to GSB. They then went to on to say they were all GSB members.

The members of GSB are there to spend student fees wisely and impact all students, not to come up with their own little projects and reach into every student’s pocket to fund it. I realize that there is no way a single project can impact all students, but one that will spend $500,000 should impact more than the amount of students that I believe are likely to attend this theater.

The following line from the proposed legislation concerns me as much as any:

“That the Government of the Student Body be responsible for any emergency or unforeseen expenses necessary to maintenance of the building in accordance with its lease agreement…” I have never been in the building that the proposed project is to be located in nor have a read the lease agreement, but I don’t understand why GSB or any lessee for that matter should be responsible if the basement wall of an old building collapses, a roof leaks or any number of other expensive repairs is needed. I believe that this line of legislation opens GSB up to a number of expenses and liabilities that could possibly dwarf the startup and operation costs of this project. At the very least I feel this line of legislation should be removed, even if it requires a change of the lease agreement to protect GSB and the student body.

Also, just for your information, the proposed legislation contains 529 words and guarantees at least $440,000, not to mention future operation costs or costs to shut down the project, which comes to a cost of $831.76 per word. That sounds pretty expensive to me.

I ask for a vote against this project, as it will waste student money and not provide the alternative weekend activity that it is intended to do.