Members of the AU Undergraduate Senate passed a bill Sunday directing SG Vice President Andrew Woods and his cabinet to make more tickets available for the Founders' Day Ball.
Tickets for the event sold out in less than two hours on Jan. 28, with 174 students on the closed waiting list, according to the bill's text.
"Calculating in everyone's excitement from the last year's event coupled with an enormous freshmen class size this semester," Class of 2009 Sen. Jeff Hanley said at Sunday's senate meeting. "The planners of this event should have known better than to expect a crowd of only 500."
Hanley, along with Class of 2010 Senator Colin Meiselman, wrote the bill after overhearing students complain about the ball.
To address the shortage and create a solution, the senator said he met with SG Comptroller Eric Goldstein and the Residence Hall Association. They estimated that an additional 400 students could attend the event for about $8,000.
Hanley said he called the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where the event is to be held, and posed as a host searching for a venue large enough for 1,000 people. Hanley said he was told "everyone would fit comfortably" under that requirement, despite the SG's initial estimation that the capacity of the auditorium is 650.
Woods, whose office oversees Founders' Day Ball, said a new contract with the venue would possibly have to be created and then approved by the university in order for 1,000 tickets to be sold - a process that could take months. Student Activities staff also wanted to keep the student limit similar to that of past balls, despite students' concerns, he said.
Woods said Sunday's meeting was the first time he learned of the Senate's willingness to allocate additional funds to the ball committee. He said he questioned whether the legislation was truly necessary when people were already working to address the ticket shortage.
Woods, who was unaware of the bill until hours before its passage, called it "slanderous."
After between six and seven months of working on the event and updating members of the SG, Woods said he disliked the senators' methods.
"The Senate has every right to be concerned," he said in a telephone interview after the bill's passage. "But the way they expressed their opinions concerns me since they never went to our committee meetings. Was it necessary to waste an hour and a half of students time instead of coming to a meeting where we would be able to support you [the senate] voluntarily?"
Woods said he would have preferred if the senators had presented their concerns at the committee meetings and said they were willing to allocate more funds to the ball, rather than meeting in secret. Senators were invited to a meeting on Friday to tackle the problem, but none attended, according to Woods.
To meet the demand for tickets, the senate voted to allocate $1,846 from SG funds and surplus money from student activity fees to the Founders' Day account.
Woods said his top priority will be to secure tickets for the wait-listed students - a goal he said will likely be accomplished.
But the debate about Founders' Day Ball tickets is not over yet, Hanley said.
"We are not done fighting for the students yet," he said. "This is not Ben [Schorr]'s ball. This is not Andrew's ball. This is not my ball. This is the students' ball."
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