Letter to the editor
The Quinn Millet sponsored bill to require the Utah Statesman to move offices was ill-advised, ill-timed and makes me ill.
About two years ago, as I finished my last year working for The Utah Statesman, I watched as the newspaper’s staff and its adviser, Jay Wamsley, worked hard to move everything from its third-floor TSC office to the basement. There was nothing wrong with the old office, but because another department received a grant that allowed them to construct new offices clad with oak cabinets and expensive desks, the Statesman was the odd man out, sent to the basement of TSC.
I don’t know how much that move cost the university, but is it really prudent to pay the costs again for the expansion of a computer lab, especially when other computer labs across campus are under used?
If the first floor of the TSC is such prime real estate, then the decision makers should of thought about that when they moved the Statesman to the basement two years ago. Wamsley and the Statesman staff should not be the ones to pay the price for lack of vision, poor planning and mismanagement of space in the TSC. This issue could have easily been mitigated by ASUSU had they not sent this legislation though like a speeding bullet on Tuesday.
So as it stands now, the Statesman seems to be in limbo over where they’ll be in the future, likely hoping they aren’t put in a far away hole like Mountain View Tower which would probably cripple their operations. Perhaps if ASUSU wants to make up for their blunder and make amends with the Statesman, they could give up some of that enormous chunk of the third-floor they currently occupy. After all, according to his own statistics, Quinn Millet would have to bring about 200 guests into his office each day to receive the same amount of traffic that the computer lab receives.
Here’s hoping Millet and ASUSU can remember that representing students also means not wasting student money on things like this.
Tyler Riggs