Iowa State Daily Editorial Board: Troy McCullough, Tim Davis, Jennifer Holland, Kathleen Carlson and Jenny Hykes.

From start to finish, planning for Music Fest ’96 seemed a little off. It seemed a little funny that organizers expected to find a national act in about one month’s time.

It seemed funny that no group on campus with any booking experience was contacted for help.

And it seemed funny that the Music Fest director was apparently unaware that there would be no national act until just after he was elected as the Government of the Student Body president.

The whole situation surrounding the event is confusing, but here is what we do know:

We’re not sure how many bands were originally contacted, but of that original list, Fish Bone was selected as an early favorite. But Fish Bone was initially rejected by a Veishea committee on March 21 — even so, no one bothered to tell Music Fest Director Adam Gold.

By March 25, Greg Parks, the director of the Maintenance Shop, knew. So did Alex Panchula, the student chair of the Committee on Lectures. And judging by the number of anonymous news tips the Daily received on the subject, several others were aware of Fish Bone’s rejection, too.

But Gold continued to hint at the great national act that would be coming to campus at least until the night before the GSB elections.

The GSB elections came and went on March 27. Gold was elected GSB president. And Music Fest announced that there would be no national act.

Apparently, Gold became aware that there would not be a national act at Music Fest when Veishea finalized the decision on March 27 (election day). He announced it publicly a day later.

It’s troubling to know that the organization for this event seemed to suffer from some severe communication problems. And it’s even more troubling to know Gold used Music Fest to get campaign votes.

A positive spot however is that no money was wasted in this endeavor. So basically the only true damage done seems to be a broken campaign promise. And campaign promises get broken every day by elected officials — we just didn’t expect it to start so soon after the election.

The Music Fest fiasco does not mean that Gold will make a bad GSB president. On the contrary, we are expecting great things from him and his vice president, Carolyn Jones, in the upcoming year.

But since Gold is the Music Fest director, and since Gold is the president-elect of the student body, he should do what every good GSB president would do.

He should apologize to the students of Iowa State.