The Bond Revenue Committee recently gave a report to the Residence Hall Association on the proposed 2 percent room and board rate increase for Fiscal Year 2014.

Mark Hudson, the director of University Housing and Dining Services, broke down the rate by percentages to the RHA for better understanding.

“We want to keep our room and board rates as low as we possibly can while providing the best services to those who choose to take part,” he said.

The expense report presented to the RHA detailed salaries, fixed cost charges, dining services and miscellaneous fees.

“Housing and Dining is a $32 million operation,” he said.

Under the salaries portion of the report, Hudson talked about 1-percent increases associated with labor union agreements.

“We know we’re going to have these increases so we need to calculate that money into the budget to break even for next year,” he said.

The current total for salaries is $8,555,010, but the projection for FY 14 is $8,643,631.

“We don’t have any predicted increases for student labor next year in terms of increases in minimum wage,” he said. “Student payroll is almost $2.2 million that our department pays out for resident assistants, desk assistants, dining hall workers and more.”

The next section of the proposed budget includes fixed cost charges.

“These are bills that the university receives collectively that need to be divided into multiple areas,” Hudson said. “For example, we have to do our own elevator maintenance.”

The section includes fire protection, insurance, elevator maintenance, management systems, trash removal and utilities.

Although there is an overall increase, there was a decrease in expenses for fire department contracts.

“The reason it went down is because every year we get farther away from the Blair Hall fire, it helps our premium like a good driver discount,” Hudson said. “Our premium went up after the fire, but we get more credit five or six years after it.”

Housing and dining currently has a $5.5 million budget for utilities, but there is a 2.52-percent increase projected for FY 14.

“That includes the cost of the energy center and utilities such as water and electricity,” he said.

The room and board rate proposal also includes indirect salaries such as business operation, Facilities Planning and Management and the University Police Department.

“This is the money of people we don’t supervise, but we pay money to other departments because they need larger staffs because of us,” he said.

There is currently a $3,862,579 budget allotted for indirect salaries in FY 13, but there will be a $38,626 increase for FY 14.

“All these folks are going to get a 1-percent salary increase, overall a 0.16-percent increase to the rate,” Hudson said.

Dining services will have proposed percentage increases across the board from food costs to commodities to contractual fees.

“We have almost a $5 million budget for food, and we serve a million meals a year,” he said. “We’re anticipating a 5-percent increase in food so that’s almost a whole percentage point in the overall room and board rate.”

The last part of the proposed room and board rate includes fees that do not fit into other categories such as equipment repairs, cable TV, bandwidth increases, Telecom, ESCO window project and a resource fund to address wireless projects and maintenance issues.

Hudson said housing and dining had to increase its bandwidth by 200 megabytes because of increasing bandwidth usage on campus, and that increase amounted to 0.21 percent of the overall increase.

“We always want to be ahead of usage,” he said.

The last big addition to the plan is the resource to address projects and maintenance issues.

“We built in $355,000 because with lower occupancy because of low enrollment, we’ve had to use up most of the money that is our project money to balance the budget,” Hudson said. “Our budget is down about $6 million so we need to do things to build some money back into the base.”

The offset revenue adjustment of $497,371 brought the overall room and board rate increase from a 4.02 percent increase to a 2 percent increase.

“We’ve been keeping track of how much our room and board increase has been going up for 37 years, and this is the lowest increase we’ve done in those 37 years by almost a percent,” Hudson said.

Robyn Dexter can be reached at 581-2812 or redexter@eiu.edu.