Below are all the details associated with this issue:
On Thursday, January 15th, Undergraduate Student Government had our first meeting of the semester. The main topic of the evening was Mines Market. With the opening of Mines Market and closure of Slate Café, there were changes in the hours of Digger Den. Mines Market is now open late at night while Digger Den’s hours were cut back. Also the previous to go option where students were allowed to grab anything Slate was offering that day was replaced with a to go sandwich with two sides. This has caused a lot of upset with the campus. As a result, USG asked a few staff members involved in this decision making process to come and speak about why this decision was made and take input on how things could be improved. Rebecca Flintoft, VP of Student Life, Gayle Witzke, Campus Dining, and Susan Fukushima, Campus Dining, were the staff present to speak.
First the reasoning behind the decision to switch the late night hours from Digger Den to Mines Market was discussed. One reason was that the location is closer to the majority of residents on campus. Another was that they wanted to showcase the new location, make it more of a “hang out” area for students who live on campus. It is more cost effective for them to run Mines Market than Digger Den since producing food in a made to order style is more expensive. They did look into the numbers of people who went to Digger Den after hours and honestly just thought that Mines Market would be viewed as a reasonable replacement for Digger Den late at night.
Obviously Mines Market is not a suitable replacement for Digger Den after 7pm. There have been over 1000 votes on What’s Your Beef and several complaints on social media about the switch. We brought up every concern that we heard to the three staff members. The main issue is that there aren’t enough options. Students used to have a wide variety of full meals to little snacks at Digger Den and now their only options are pizza and salad. This issue is only going to get worse when students start having common hours and need something to eat after or when the semester starts getting harder and people are up late studying. Also, for students with evening classes that go past seven, only having one food option for dinner is unacceptable. Another concern is that there are hardly any options past seven that are healthy. The salad bar recently opened but that is it. Students were also concerned about options for gluten free or dairy free food for people with food allergies, but it was explained that there is always gluten free or dairy free option all that you need to do is ask for it!
The next big issue was that Mines Market is a terrible option for people without unlimited meal plans. Getting into Mines Market costs about $9 dollars where as at Digger Den you could get a full meal for $5. This doesn’t really affect people with unlimited meal plans because they would most likely use a meal swipe at either location, so cost is the same. But for upperclassmen or anyone on a lower tear meal plan it is an issue. Anything lower than unlimited only gets two meal swipes a day so if they use those up they have to use Munch Money to get food past 7 and that costs them significantly more than Digger Den. And then anyone without a meal plan is paying out of pocket $9 for food they may not even want that much, but it is now the only option at that late hour. Also, Mines Market is like Slate where there isn’t anywhere to sit unless you pay to get in, so this really reduces the atmosphere that Digger Den had. Several freshman would go there weekend nights and hang out, regardless if all their friends were eating. Now this hang out spot is gone.
USG communicated to the staff that the beset option would be to reopen Digger Den and close Mines Market past 7. However, the response to this was that there would be some ‘serious repercussions’ for doing this. This may include taking away hours from other locations like Subway or raising the prices at Digger Den. We think this is ridiculous since its essentially the exactly the same cost and same plan as what was happening last semester. Unfortunately, we don’t know what we could do to prevent that from happening.
The Sodexo staff were very open to all of the feedback we had to give them about Mines Market. So, they have started implementing a few things to make it better for the students. First, they agreed to allow people to take full to go bozes of food again, which is great! Anther change they are going to start making is rotating food options from night to night and trying to have at least two or three options available a night. That way it’s not just pizza all the time. Also they are working in bringing in a la carte options. This includes snacks like they used to have at Digger Den like ice cream, candy, fridges for drinks, etc. That way people who want to grab a snack to take back to the dorms or upperclassmen without meal plans can get a cheap snack. Also they are going to have the option to take pizza to go so that students can take it back to their dorm. We are really hoping that these changes help and we will be continuing to be giving feedback to Sodexo so that they can continue improving.
One thing to point out is that Digger Den is being replaced next year with more restaurant style options. It’ll be similar in that it’s made to order food and there will be lots of options like grill food, maybe sushi, Mexican, etc. Once this is open it will have the late night hours like Digger Den did. So Mines Market should only be open for the late night for one semester. Still, we are doing our best to make sure that there are adequate late night options for this semester.
Overall USG wanted to convey to the three staff that the school is solely responsible for the food options that on campus students have. Since it’s mostly freshman, they don’t have cars to transport them to locations downtown. They are forced to spend thousands of dollars on a meal plan already and should not be forced to buy additional food because their options are so terrible. Switching Digger Den and Mines Market hours back to what they normally were will apparently have ‘serious repercussions’ and we don’t know what we can do to prevent that. USG is trying very hard to make sure that Mines Market is improving. We really appreciate hearing what people have to say and want to hear if the proposed changes help or if they don’t help. Any feedback you have will be taken to Sodexo so that they can continue to make changes.
Hi!
I just want to remind you all that we have a meeting tonight at 6pm in Petroleum Hall where we will be discussing this issue. We will have a speaker present who was involved in this decision so please come with questions or concerns you’d like to express. The more the merrier!
Love,
USG
___________________
Hello,
Our first USG meetings are next week. We will be sure to bring up these concerns in our executive meeting and the council meeting. General council meetings take place on Thursdays at 6pm in Petroleum Hall and are open for anyone to attend! We hope we can help sort out this problem for you guys soon!
Love,
USG
Anonymous
Hello,
My name is Matt Ryan and I am the MAC President. Thank you for being honest and sharing your thoughts. It is disappointing to hear we aren't meeting your expectations as a council, but I'd like to clear up a few details to see if I can help appease your concerns
First, we do not think of ourselves as "above" other campus clubs, but we are an organization in a different capacity. We are a governing body on our campus, just as the Undergraduate Student Government (USG), the Board of Student Organizations (BSO), and five others are as well. We have to justify our allocations each year just as every governing body does and our budget is decided by a vote during USG Senate. Clubs receive their allocations from BSO's allocation based on their executive board's discretion.
To address our expenditures, we are paid for the time we put into planning, running, and cleaning up events. The time we commit varies from week to week, from about five hours during weeks in the fall where we only have one event, to our maximum at E-days when we work about 15 to 18 hours per day from Thursday to Saturday, plus clean up time on Sunday. However, those salaries do not currently come from our budget, as there would not be enough due to budget cuts to put on all of the events that we do. In the past we were paid from our own budget, but chose to give up our salaries as not to negatively impact the campus when our budget was cut. Last year we began to be paid again, but by the SAIL office for two reasons: first, for liability reasons, because the university needs to be able to legally represent us for the number of contracts and other expenditures we make. Second, the time we spend doing MAC work prevents us from holding higher paying jobs, and while we all love MAC and the work we are doing, several of us would not be able to continue doing this work for personal finance reasons. As for internal spending, 6.4% of our total budget allocated from USG goes towards our retreats, trainings, NACA conference, and operations expenses. 1.5% of the 6.4% goes towards food for MACers and volunteers during E-Days and other long events. Our trip to Boston was for a four day conference called the National Association for Campus Activities, or NACA as mentioned above. While there, we attend educational sessions to improve our skills as a council, collaborate with university programming boards from across the country, and attend showcases of possible performers for upcoming events. This allows us to book performers at discounted rates and block book them well in advance to ensure the success of some of our future events. NACA is a fundamental key for us, and allows us to program strong, efficient events at Mines.
The lack of club support is something I am sad to hear you believe. This year alone we have worked with several clubs to host events, including one just last week (Olympic watch party and CSMMAC) and two scheduled for next week (Smiles with USG and ARK, as well as Hidden Figures with WISEM). Additionally, we have an Outreach chair, Lauren Wilson, whose job is to talk with other organizations and organize collaborative events. We want all of your interactions with MACers to be positive, so we apologize for the negative ones you may have experienced, but we will continue to work to improve that.
To address the $100 MAC apparel item that we received this year, we have a wonderful connection with an alumnus who works at Patagonia. She was able to offer these sweaters to us at below cost. I do understand how these sweaters would invoke pretentious feelings, but we would never spend more than $40 on a MAC apparel item, and if we do we ask MACers to contribute personal funds. We do feel strongly that an item we can wear to most events and around campus allows people to put a face to our small team and bonds us together, two critical components to our mission.
I'm sorry to hear that you believe we are undeserving Mines. However, I hope that I've cleared up some of your points of contention. If you would like to discuss this topic further, please feel free to reach out to me at maryan@mymail.mines.edu or Lauren at lawilson@mymail.mines.edu. We would be happy to discuss this topic further with you and walk you through our budgeting process. Additionally, allocation presentations for governing bodies will be happening in a few weeks and I would like to strongly encourage you to come listen to our presentation!
If your organization would like to possibly plan an event with MAC, please just let Lauren know your ideas or sign-up to participate at our E-Days carnival or an opportunity of the like. Ultimately, our goal is to improve the quality of life for as many students as we can on this campus and will do whatever we can to make that happen. We are all Mines students and understand the struggles we endure, and as a council we are doing our best to give our students an opportunity to relax and enjoy themselves.
Respectfully,
Matt