In its first meeting of the year, the Government of the Student Body almost unanimously decided to “throw back the bone” by refusing to distribute 50 student parking passes given to GSB by the ISU athletic department.

In its Wednesday night meeting in the Campanile Room of the Memorial Union, the GSB senate passed a bill titled “Throwing Back the Bone” with a 30-0-1 vote. The bill stated no GSB official could be involved with or assist in the sale, allocation or distribution of parking passes for Jack Trice Stadium for home football games. The passed bill requires any and all passes received by GSB officials be returned to their sender.

University officials made the decision to no longer allow students to tailgate around the stadium during home football games this summer. Reasons cited for the decision included increasing security and student safety, making room for an increase in the number of National Cyclone Club members and decreasing the amount of illegal activity around the stadium, among others. Students will now be allowed to tailgate in the grass fields on the other side of Elwood Drive and near Hilton Coliseum.

GSB President Mike Banasiak had set up an e-mail account where students could contact GSB to register for a random lottery for chances to receive a parking pass. Banasiak said the plan for distributing the passes was to pick 50 random students from the e-mails sent to the account.

“I actually got the passes from Dean of Students Pete Englin, who got them from the athletic department, and [GSB] was completely surprised by that and we didn’t know it was coming,” Banasiak said.

He said with the little time he and GSB were given to distribute the passes, the random e-mail drawing was the fairest way they could provide the passes to students.

“I feel that GSB is here to represent student opinion, and if students have the mindset of being treated unfairly, then certainly that needs to be expressed to the athletic department, and the senate made a good decision,” Banasiak said.

He said he will sit down tomorrow with Athletic Director Bruce Van De Velde to explain to him why the senate made their decision and how GSB believes students feel about the issue. He also said he hopes to discuss with Van De Velde how better lines of communication can be created between the athletic department, GSB and students.

“[The GSB vote] was a good decision. We need to get together with students and the athletic department to figure out the next steps. It will work out though,” Englin said.

“If this had been an April conversation, we wouldn’t have been here tonight. We’re always better served when we involve students in decisions that affect their lives. We would have arrived at a decision where the students understand the implications of the decision better and would have contributed to a possibly different outcome that would have satisfied everyone. I believe we’re at that spot now.”

Englin said the passes will go back to the athletic department for them to decide how to handle distribution.

“The university made this decision with a minimum of student input, and then only after the decision was made, and we’re not all happy with that,” said off-campus senator William Rock, who is also the author of the bill. “If [the university] is going to make these decisions, then they should deal with the consequences and not [GSB]. My feeling is if they want to distribute these passes to students, they should do it themselves. Giving us these passes is adding insult to injury and [GSB] won’t play this game.”

Rock also said it’s “logistically ridiculous” to expect GSB to distribute 50 passes among 27,000 students in less than a week.

Tony Luken, GSB speaker of the senate and co-author of the bill, said he believes the university “made their bed and now they can sleep in it.”

The senate did pass an amendment to the bill striking out two phrases they deemed were harsh and inaccurate.

The senate struck the phrase “The plan to distribute 50 parking passes to students is equivalent to using a Band-Aid on a bullet wound” because of the harsh wording of the phrase.

The senate also struck a phrase saying a significant portion of the funding to create and maintain the affected parking lots was obtained from students through parking division fees.

Off-campus Senator Casey Harvey moved for the phrasing to be removed because funding for the new stadium parking lot was taken from money given by students to the athletic department, not specific fees paid to fund the parking division.

The bill does state GSB was not involved in the process of moving students out of the stadium parking lot, and has “no reason to cover the mistakes of others.”

“Distributing parking passes has never come under the purview of GSB, and full-time ISU students give $21 per semester to the athletic department, making every ISU student a donor to the athletic department.

The National Cyclone Club Web site, http://cyclones.ocsn.com/boosters/iast-boosters-ncc.html, states ‘Parking locations are based on the level of giving,’ and therefore ISU students should not be left out.”