If ASUO can’t break tie, Duck Athletics will get $0 from students. 02/07/2015

http://www.uomatters.com/2015/02/uo-board-to-give-rob-mullens-or-mark-helfrich-another-raise.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

2/7/2014 update:

It turns out the ASUO committee tie-breaker vote reported below was disallowed. They are going to meet again Tuesday 8AM (in the Rogue River room, I think) to try again. Presumably AAD Eric Roedl will be there, hat in hand.

If the committee can’t come to an agreement, the athletics department will get $0 from ASUO, although they’ll still get the millions in other subsidies described here and below.

AD Rob Mullens will then have to decide if he wants to cut the UO students off from access to the Autzen Stadium Student Section, or take other steps to limit student access to Duck games. Which would be political suicide for the Duck Athletic Department, so presumably the AD is engaging in some heavy student arm-twisting this weekend.

Of course Mullens couldn’t implement the nuclear option without the approval of Interim President Scott Coltrane. So, what do you think readers? What are the chances Scott Coltrane would let Rob Mullens cut the number of student football tickets?

2/6/2015 2:30 update: ASUO Committee votes to cut the mandatory student fee for Duck athletics from $1.6M to $1.3M

For background on the AD’s efforts to squeeze ASUO for more student money see here, and for more on the hidden subsidies for athletics see here.

Short version: The Ducks have hit price resistance from their regular fans, so they want to raise the fee to student government to ~$80 per student, to provide “free” tickets via a lottery. This is the second meeting of the ASUO committee that will recommend yes or no. The first meeting is described below. As usual, our students run an excellent meeting and the discussion is very polite, direct, and well informed.

At the last meeting, Duck AAD for Finance Eric Roedl asked for a 10% increase, to $1.8M:

After getting a thorough shellacking by the students, he doesn’t show up this time. In fact he already’s dropped down to asking for a 3% increase. The students are skeptical of even that. Many ask why any mandatory student fee money should go to athletics.

Their most favored option seems to be to move to a model where students can opt in to pay a voluntary feee to athletics, for a lottery for football tickets in the same student section as now, and free tickets for basketball and other less popular sports. The voluntary fee would be higher, but only those wanting to go to games would have to pay it. The athletics department likes the current system, because it isolates them from the free-market, and hides the true cost of the tickets from UO students. (If you ask students, most will tell you they pay nothing for the chance to enter the ticket lottery. They’re quite surprised to learn how much it really costs.) This change would take a while to implement however.

As the discussion evolves it turns out that the Ducks aren’t just making ASUO pay for the tickets, they’re also adding on a DAF “donation fee”. Wow – is this whole scheme legal? I’d check the legal opinions from UO’s General Counsel’s office, but I had to give those back. Bummer.

In the end, of course, Roedl discounts everything, perhaps to account for the fact that the IRS deduction on the “donation” isn’t worth anything to student government, but most importantly because student demand is pretty price-elastic, so a bit of price-discrimination is profit maximizing for the Ducks.

A committee member proposes a cut from $1.6M to $1.3M, for the same number of tickets, instead of the increase to $1.8M Roedl was shooting for. Roedl’s response, by email, is to try and confuse the students with some accounting jargon.

Student question: What might Roedl and Mullens do if ASUO cuts the subsidy – would they cut the student tickets off? No more tickets? Oh My God!

Fat chance. Their salaries depend on being able to credibly claim the Ducks are part of UO’s academic mission – no students, no IRS tax deductions for the donors, and taxes on the ESPN money etc. That’s the death penalty for college football – or at least a big salary cut for some well paid AD employees.

The AD budget is apparently $98M. The $300k we’re talking about here is roughly one day of revenue for them. Their revenue went up about $10M last year. This money is a a rounding error to them.

Lubash: I have a problem with requiring students, many of whom are borrowing money to pay their tuition and fees, to pay the athletic department money $71 a year for a chance to buy a ticket that they might not even want. Yes, I ran on a platform of getting more tickets – and on fiscal responsibility. The athletic department is not going to agree to more student tickets. So lets at least reduce the cost of the tickets that we can get.

At around 4:45, after a lot of well considered discussion, the committee votes 4-3 to recommend to the full ASUO that the fee to athletics be cut from $1.6M to ~$1.3M. If AAD Eric Roedl doesn’t like it, he’s 72 hours to put together an appeal and bring it to the committee on Monday. So stay tuned!

2/6/2015 11:00AM: 2:30-4 in Chapman 204. See below for background.

Rumor has it that AAD Eric Roedl might not show. He got angry about having to answer questions from students last time. Just like he got angry about having to answer questions from the faculty last year, and stopped coming to the IAC meetings.

Here’s the agreement between Johnson Hall and Athletics, to divert academic money towards the “presidential skybox” at Autzen, etc. That’s right, UO students pay for the administrator’s football skybox. It took a petition to the DOJ to pry this document out of UO – now it’s on the AD’s website, here.