The Graduate and Professional Student Senate voted against a resolution supporting the proposed $52.8 million recreation renovations Monday night.

The proposed resolution, Senate Resolution S08-01, received a vote of 20 in favor and 25 opposed.

This is the first obstacle the proposed renovations have faced. The proposal has already passed a student body referendum and a vote by the Government of the Student Body.

GPSS was supposed to vote on the resolution last week but did not have enough members in attendance to hold the vote. Monday’s meeting was a special session because GPSS usually only meets once a month.

The proposed renovations would also include air-conditioning in Lied Recreation Athletic Center, an addition to State Gym and a skywalk between State Gym and Beyer Hall.

Echoing several comments made that evening, Rebecca Brown, graduate student in entomology and treasurer for GPSS, expressed concern over the proposed renovations.

Brown said she does use the recreational services at Iowa State and would appreciate air-conditioning in Lied. She also said she thought something needed to be done, but she said she questioned the scale of the renovations.

“As a graduate student, I came here for the academics rather than the recreation,” Brown said.

Ryan Myers, graduate student in accounting and finance director for GSB, presented some information about the renovations to GPSS and tried to persuade the senate to pass the bill.

Myers said the renovation project has had heavy student involvement.

“Students have asked for this to come,” Myers said.

He said many current graduate students would not be affected by the majority of the new fees brought about by the renovations.

In other matters, Brown presented the beginnings of a bill to help fund the university’s ability to better access journals online.

She said the senate will have an excess of $59,000 in its budget this spring and funding access to journals in the sciences and arts and humanities would serve the needs of current graduate students.

“[The excess money] should really be benefiting graduate students now,” Brown said.

Brown presented two options for using the money. The first was to provide funding to the library in order to extend its “JSTOR” collection, which is an online archive of scholarly journals and is used by ISU students, particularly those in the arts and humanities.

The second option Brown suggested was to help fund an extension of SciFinder, the fifth-highest research tool used in the e-Library. Currently, Brown said the library only has six users for SciFinder, meaning only six people can use the tool at one time. She said funding from the senate would help add two more users, enabling more people to access the popular database.