OUR VIEW: A new deadline with the same questions

Dorms are a staple at every university in the nation. Jam-packed with mostly lower classmen, they epitomize the free feeling of being away from home and being allowed to eat pizza, make out all day and stay up all night.

But dorms have to be done to be lived in. That’s the problem USU is facing with the Living Learning Center, the new university housing on the west side of campus. Three of the six buildings are still not finished.

That’s right. They’re still not done.

The whole complex was supposed to be finished by now. The new expected completion date is more than a year later than when they were supposed to be done. Our question is: how are they still not done and will they even fill up?

Housing says they ran into problems removing the steam plant that was in the hill and had a lack of workers. There are unforeseen things that happen with any undertaking, but how much extra money has it cost USU to continue building a year past what was expected? We were told the LLC would be done at the end of last semester, now we’re being told it will be done at the end of this semester. How much longer can we afford to build the LLC?

The other problem housing is facing is a lack of students to fill up the shiny new buildings. There are only half of them done, yet those three buildings are not filling up.

Maybe it’s the price tag – the LLC costs more per semester than most other student housing does for the entire year. Or maybe it’s the meal plan – part of the price tag is the meal plan and students don’t seem to like having only one option of where to eat for two meals a day. Or maybe it’s just the roommates – the suite-style housing puts more students in one unit than other on-campus housing.

Whatever it is, perhaps housing should revisit the logic behind the LLC. It might not be worth building pretty new dorms if you spend more money than you ought to and then can’t fill them up. Housing – we realize you needed a cool selling point, but it could grow old pretty quickly if nobody wants to live there.