Fourth Estate News Reporter Brianna Perry
Mason makes basketball sustainable
|Striving to go green, the Office of Sustainability at Mason is raising awareness for green efforts on campus at a venue where trash seems to overflow: basketball games.
This Saturday’s basketball game against George Washington University will host an event called the Game Day Challenge. It’s a competition between different universities to see who can properly recycle and compost the most during a single sporting event.
Email to Student Body Reveals Plans for Mason Inn
|On Monday afternoon, students received an email from President Cabrera about the decision to transform the Mason Inn, currently a luxury hotel located on campus, to a residential, dining, and instructional facility.
Since it’s opening in fall 2010, the Mason Inn has lost roughly $11 million. Based on the losses, President Cabrera formed a Mason Inn Task Force at the beginning of the semester to propose new business models that would make the hotel more profitable. After the official proposal was written for President Cabrera’s review, the task force and the President agreed that converting the hotel into a facility that would serve the student body and faculty directly would yield the best results.
Mason Inn Task Force to make drastic changes to hotel’s business model
|Since its opening, the Mason Inn has lost roughly $11 million dollars. Jennifer Wagner Davis, Mason's senior vice president for administration and finance, estimates that the Mason Inn loses between $2 to $2.5 million annually. Davis said, in regards to the lost money, “we have taken it all out of the auxiliary enterprise reserves and we are now below our level of reserves that we need to run the institution appropriately.”
In response to concerns, Mason suspends sale of general permits
|Last Thursday, Sept. 5, Parking Services at George Mason University made the call to stop the sale of general permit passes in an attempt to contain the demand for parking; something they have never done before.