The Spectator reported on a proposal sent to the Undergraduate Student Councils this morning. ESC has just released an official response approving the proposal and funding a subsidy to help with the costs of opening the lawns and hiring safety personnel. The full text of the ESC proposal is included below. Post will be updated with additional Student Council Responses if and when they are released.

Regarding the Engineering Student Council Vote on the March 26th Bacchanal Proposal

Over the past several months, the Bacchanal Committee has worked to put together the spring concert on April 4th. As students on campus are well aware, the Bacchanal Committee chose to charge for tickets to attend this event. Combined with the event capacity of 4,000 persons, this decision has caused a large subset of the student body to feel that they have been unfairly shut out of a campus-­wide event.

Through a series of discussions with Student Engagement, Facilities, Public Safety, and other administrative parties, representatives from all four councils and the Activities Board at Columbia have worked with the Bacchanal Committee to make the event more open and accessible to students on campus.

The most recent proposal, finalized early in the morning on March 26th, involves opening the West Lawn and the Butler Lawn for an additional 2,000 tickets. Along with the roughly 300 tickets remaining from the main audience area, this allows up to 6,000 students to attend Bacchanal. We consider this to be a significant improvement over the status quo. Current ticket holders will be refunded, and will also have the option to release their ticket and attempt to get a lawn ticket. It is not currently expected that students will be able to hold both a standard and a lawn ticket.

However, this plan is expensive. Our current estimates are that the total cost of the Bacchanal event to the student body will be approximately $160,000, which represents 151% of the allocation that Bacchanal received from the Activities Board at Columbia. In particular, it constitutes an additional council subsidy of $54,000 over the original allocation.
After a general body vote, ESC has decided to fund this subsidy with a vote of (21 for, 3 against, 6 abstain) in ratio. This works out to $8,248.84 from the SEAS student body, or $5.20 per student.

This decision does not constitute an official ESC endorsement of the circumstances that have necessitated this subsidy, nor does it imply that ESC will be willing to continue funding Bacchanal at the same level in the future. We do not take this decision lightly, and we feel that it is the option that best benefits the undergraduate engineering population at Columbia.

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to the executive board via email at esc@columbia.edu.

Best regards,
Engineering Student Council