Because of recent residence hall government legislation, ISU dorm residents won’t be riding the bus with discounted passes.

A bill proposing a discounted resident rate for CyRide was voted down at Thursday’s Inter-Residence Hall Association meeting.

The IRHA parliament said a CyRide bill passed by the Towers Residence Association senate last week affected voting on the bill.

IRHA’s CyRide bill, which would have offered student passes for $66 per year or $44 per semester, was rejected 4-17 because many IRHA members said TRA had already taken care of the issue. A regular student CyRide pass costs $50 per semester.

The TRA legislation charges Towers residents $35 per year for use of the Brown Route, which runs from TRA to the ISU campus.

“In Towers, we decided to take care of this ourselves,” Wallace Representative Zewde Demissie said.

The $35 fee still has to be approved by the ISU Department of Residence and the Board of Regents.

IRHA also passed a bill 21-1 accepting an increase in room and board rates. The increases were about 5 percent for undergraduate housing and about 6 percent for Maple Hall.

TRA President Bill Wychulis made amendments to the bill to include the additional $35 fee for Towers residents.

Since TRA passed its own bill to fund CyRide’s Brown Route, the $55,000 from the Department of Residence that was originally going to subsidize the discounted prices of CyRide can now be reallocated.

Director of Residence Randy Alexander, who attended the meeting, said the money could go toward reducing the prices of ethernet use in dorm rooms.

“One of the potential uses [of the $55,000] is to buy down the cost of the ethernet,” Alexander said. “It could be reduced to $6 [monthly].” Currently, the cost of ethernet is $7 per month in addition to an installation fee.

A bill dealing with ethernet prices was proposed and rejected at IRHA’s Jan. 27 meeting. According to that bill, every student would pay a flat fee for ethernet service, which would be less than $60. Every room would be hooked up to an ethernet connection instead of having residents pay an installation fee.

However, the bill failed because parliament said the timing wasn’t appropriate, and not all residents own computers.

Alexander asked IRHA to draw up a bill in the near future to provide for the increasing number of students using the ethernet.

“At the rate it’s growing, I think we can assume that this time next year, two-thirds of students will be using it,” Alexander said.