At the front of the Boca Raton campus sits a four-year-old marquee that, due to multiple problems, isn’t working. If that wasn’t bad enough, the marquee was paid for using our student money.

Terry Mena, the interim dean of Student Affairs, says that because the marquee was made in Canada, it wasn’t constructed for Florida’s hotness … weather, that is.

“The marquee was built for the weather of Canada, which is usually 60-65 degrees [Fahrenheit],” Mena says. “The lifespan is slowly deteriorating due to the heat.”

SG President Tony Teixeira says that former President Alvira Kahn was the person in charge of purchasing the marquee. Kahn, who bought it in 2003, shelled out close to a half-million dollars in Activity and Service fees derived from each student’s tuition; $10 per credit hour per student goes to funding A&S fees.

Mena says that Student Affairs advised Kahn against purchasing the 10 foot by 10 foot marquee because of our Florida heat. However, she went against Administration’s suggestions and now we are stuck with $500,000 worth of junk that has been struck by lightning twice.

The most recent lightning strike “knocked off a power surge in the Visitor Booth computer,” where the main computer system for the marquee is operated from, according to Mena.

While the heat has been slowly eating away at the marquee, along with a couple strikes of lighting, SG hired a Tampa-based company to fix the problems. Debbi Schaefer is a co-owner of LED Tampa, the company brought in to inspect and repair the marquee. When I got a chance to talk to Schaefer in mid-August, she advised me that their work was done and it was now a computer problem.

“The hardware works perfectly,” Schaefer says. “It’s the tech part that needs work.”

Even though the lightning strikes are the most recent problems, Mena said that the Florida heat was still too much for the marquee to handle. When he, along with an LED technician, went into the marquee to search for problems, the temperatures reached close to 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

“We put in cooling fans so it wouldn’t overheat,” Mena says.

However, despite the fixations from LED Tampa and cooling fans, the marquee is still not up and running due to technical difficulties.

Lucky for me, I know that Information Resource Management (IRM) handles all technology-based issues for the university’s computers. When I spoke with Jeff Schilit, associate provost for IRM, he said that he received the order from SG on September 18 and assigned a person to find out the problem a day later. Schilit says that it is no longer a problem with the marquee itself – it is a problem with the computer.

“The machine that controls the marquee is out of business,” Schilit says. “It’s a fried hard drive. It’s up to [SG] to take care of ordering the parts.”

SG Graduate Assistant Rohit Sinha says that even though the hard drive is the most recent discovery of problems with the marquee, it could end up being more.

“We don’t know what else is faulty,” Sinha says. “We need a new hard drive, but since IRM only handles software, we now refer the case to the vendor [Dell].”

However, Sinha reassured me that he, along with everyone else at Student Government, Student Affairs and IRM are “on the job.”

On top of the extravagant spending on the marquee, SG has spent close to $6,500 in repairs, according to SG Treasurer Joe Adams. Mena, who wasn’t here when the marquee was purchased, says that despite Kahn’s bad judgment, Student Affairs is still attempting to fix it.

“We’re trying to maintain something that was a bad decision,” Mena says. “Every day we get an update of how it’s being fixed or how something else is wrong. Even when it’s fixed, it’s really broken.”

Something tells me that if all of these people are relying on someone else – whether it be another department, a vendor or a hardware company – no work will ever get accomplished. That piece of junk will be sitting there until someone has a bright idea of acknowledging that it was a mistake and throw it out. If it was out of commission this summer, what makes our esteemed leaders think it’s going to work next summer?