Discussions begin for potential MacHall food court renovations

By Matty Hume, June 22 2018 —

In his June 5 executive report for Students’ Legislative Council, Students’ Union vice-president operations and finance Kevin Dang reported that he had met with SU staff to discuss potential renovations to the MacHall food court. According to SU president Sagar Grewal, food court renovations have already been considered financially, with money in the SU budget allocated to consultation fees.

“Right now it’s really just the planning phase,” Grewal said. “SLC [went] over the budget and we have set aside some money to do this consultation. Our hope is this consultation will give us an idea of what the campus community envisions the future of MacHall being.”

The SU plans on consulting with students and the wider campus community to determine the goals of the renovations. The consultations will include public SU town halls, which were a component of Grewal’s campaign platform.

“We’re hoping to launch it at the SU town hall in the fall,” he said. “After we get our responses, collect our data and analyse it, we’re actually planning a second town hall in the winter semester.”

In addition to the town halls, Grewal hopes to launch an online survey to make providing input accessible for students.

“We’re just hoping that this is going to be something that students are really interested in and get their feedback on,” Grewal said. “It’s obviously been a really long time since we’ve consulted students on this. This is a building that students have fought for and put money into, so we hope that alone drives students to want to fill out our survey.”

Currently, the SU does not have any explicit information on potential outcomes of the food court renovations. According to Grewal, specific plans will only be outlined after public consultation.

“Our idea is we’re going to wait until we get the results back and will slowly decide what [the renovations] are going to look like,” he said. “Otherwise, we’re planning before consulting and that’s not our best practice.”