Residence students have something they can phone home about.
The Rideau River Residence Association (RRRA) announced Jan. 6 that students living in residence during the 2015-16 academic year will not be charged a mandatory fee for having a landline telephone in their rooms.
RRRA has been working to eradicate the compulsory charge, as many students, equipped with cellphones, are no longer in need of a landline telephone, said Graham Pedregosa, the association’s vice-president (administration).
The policy change was a major platform point for Pedregosa’s slate, New Leadership, led by president Will Verschuren.
“Our main platform point was room phones,” Pedregosa said.
Despite previous RRRA administrations’ unsuccessful attempts at finding a solution to the fee, the New Leadership platform said they succeeded by working closely with the university.
“We started speaking to the university right away, the day we got into office,” he said. “We have been working with the administration, we wanted to show them that this was an issue and we wanted to find a resolution to it.”
RRRA worked with housing director Laura Storey to get rid of the fee.
“We could not have done this without the support and co-operation of our partners within the University’s administration,” Verschuren said in a press release. “We are proud to have worked with the administration to find a solution for the room phone fee as we promised we would do.”
He added RRRA has made a point of keeping its election promises this year.
“Rather than playing politics we have been focused on students, worked with the administration, and have results,” he said.
Storey said the fee removal process was “quite lovely” because all parties involved were working towards the same result.
“We were actually rowing in the same direction. We were hoping for the same outcome,” she said.
The money formerly used for the landline phones will now be funneled into technical services related to the Internet, Storey said.
