Students questioned campus department heads about the future of housing, public transportation and sustainability efforts at the Residence Hall Association’s town hall event Tuesday night.

Directors from the Transportation Services, Dining Services, Resident Life and Residential Facilities departments, as well as a sustainability representative from the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, spoke to about 40 students in the Benjamin Banneker Room of the Stamp Student Union about their concerns for the future of the campus.

COMMUNITY ASSISTANTS

The new housing policy that will increase the number of freshmen and sophomores living on the campus and subsequently push more upperclassmen off the campus. It will also affect juniors and seniors who have community assistant positions.

When Resident Life released its Fall 2015 Housing Outlook in January, it cited a potential decline in space for upperclassmen because of construction projects. This caused the department to change its housing selection process, no longer allowing juniors and seniors to take part in the traditional lottery.

Resident Life Director Deb Grandner said her department decided that exemptions to the new housing policies could not be made for those in CA positions. Resident Life employs more than 400 students, and if housing were ensured for all of them, it would cut into the available number of spaces for other students, she said

“The answer kind of makes me sad, but it’s the truth,” Grandner said. “We can’t guarantee them the space. … There probably won’t be many juniors and seniors in the position.”

DOTS

As more upperclassmen move off the campus, junior accounting and finance major Tyler Boyles asked DOTS Director David Allen if bus services would be expanded to better accommodate those students.

DOTS officials will increase bus services, Allen said, especially during evening service hours and to apartment buildings along Route 1 during the next few years, although final plans are still being discussed.

“We are going to be buying a few more buses to bolster our existing service. … We’re hoping to buy two more,” Allen said. “And we’re hoping to work with students to create more routes that are more appealing with the understanding that we can’t drive down Campus Drive.”

Allen said he recognizes this year has been more difficult in terms of accessibility for bus services. For the past 12 years, total bus ridership increased steadily from less than a million to about 3.5 million, he said, but so far this academic year, those numbers have “ticked down.”

“The College Park Metro ridership is down 5 percent and others are down about 25 percent,” Allen said. “We think it’s because of convenience, because buses can’t stop by [Stamp] Student Union anymore and can only go to the Regents [Drive] Garage.”

DOTS officials hope to expand route options and fix those problems with more student input, he said.

DINING SERVICES

Several students also asked Dining Services Director Colleen Wright-Riva about improving sustainable carryout options in the dining halls.

Sasha Galbreath, a sophomore government and politics major and RHA’s Resident Life Advisory Team chairwoman, asked Wright-Riva if there were any plans to reduce the use of plastic carryout containers and switch to using only OZZI boxes.

Wright-Riva said Dining Services officials have discussed that possibility, but with hundreds of carryout transactions per day, it could be a huge transition and would require purchasing more OZZI boxes, which cost $5 each.

“We have explored some ideas, but we don’t really know what can work,” Wright-Riva said. “We are by far the biggest school that uses [OZZI boxes]. … No other school has done that.”

Junior Arabic and French major Elise Harris suggested that incremental changes could be made.

“Now, we have to ask for OZZI boxes at the stations,” Harris said. “Maybe we could move to OZZIs being the default for carryout.”

Wright-Riva agreed OZZI boxes should be a more visible and accessible option. She said Dining Services officials could start to make that idea part of staff training.

“So when you say you aren’t dining in, the first question could be, ‘Do you want an OZZI box?’” Wright-Riva said.