Column by Austin Schmitt

Big government has come to the city of Lexington and it doesn’t end with the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government.

The recently publicized new student housing plan presented by LFUCG, and a group within, titled the Student Housing Task Force has come under scrutiny. The plan would prevent off-campus neighborhoods to house students living right next to each other, effectively pushing students farther and farther away from campus.

A student gathering on Sept. 22 that started at UK and marched to City Hall to argue the plan is a beginning, but UK students may want to retrace their steps.

LFUCG is not the only ones stirring the pot, but members of UK’s community are in on the deal as well. Five members of UK’s community, Lisa Higgins-Hord, UK assistant vice president for university engagement, Tony Blanton, UK assistant dean of students, Joe Monroe, UK interim chief of police, Tyler Montell, former UK Student Government president and Nick Stamatiadis, a UK engineering professor, are part of this task force, according to the Student Housing Task Force report.

Think the city of Lexington could get away with a ludicrous plan like this and not include UK?  Take another look, students. It’s not just Lexington that wants to take away your rights to live in an off-campus residence, it is the very people within your campus community.

This is a hard sell for me. According to the report, 76 percent of UK students live off campus. With some simple math, that leaves 24 percent of UK students living on campus, which is approximately one quarter of the total undergraduate population.  One quarter of 18,000 undergraduate students is about 4,500 students. UK Housing can only house around 5,100 students on campus, according to its Web site.

So where do the rest of these students live? The obvious answer is close to campus in an off-campus residence. When students are progressively pushed off campus, they look to find a residence relatively close to campus, maybe even within walking distance of their classes.  Get ready for this mind-blowing revelation; students may live in groups of homes called neighborhoods “neighboring” UK so they can get to class in an efficient manner.

Well, this seemingly obvious concept is getting blown to bits by the proposed new student housing regulations. Not only is this plan inconceivable, it is not fair. This plan asks students to move farther away from campus, effectively eliminating the easy walk to class and giving UK more problems.

Oh wait, alternative ways to get to campus are available, right?  One could easily begin to ride their bike to campus. No, that wouldn’t work because there’s this new procedure about registering bikes and being able to park and chain the bikes only in certain places. Throw that idea out the window.

Drive your car to campus?  That’s the biggest joke of them all.  Every student knows driving on and around campus gives the driver more of a headache than cramming the night before a final exam.  Also, students surely wouldn’t want to contribute to Lexington’s carbon footprint — already the highest in the nation — by adding more vehicles on the road during high-traffic periods.

How about LexTran or the UK bus system? It’s a possibility, but LexTran’s schedules are not flexible for students on the move.

They are also part of LFUCG.  Does anyone detect the scent of a conspiracy?

So now that there are no efficient ways to get to class, what are students to do?

This is only one of the problems with this plan. It’s hard to believe that members of the UK community on this task force would stand for a plan like this.

Did they have the best intentions of the students in mind when they contributed to these meetings?

Under the plan, any student that wants to move into an off-campus home must apply for a permit and pay a “small annual fee” to LFUCG that would pay the cost of periodic inspections every two to three years. More money for students to pay, leaving them deeper in debt when they leave school. With tuition rising every year and more fees added every year, isn’t this a little over the top?

The problem will only get worse under these new guidelines.  With UK calling to increase undergraduate enrollment to 25,000 by the year 2020 under the glorious top-20 plan, student housing will only become harder to come by and UK isn’t doing much to help. Also included in the report, it stated that UK only plans to increase the on-campus housing by 1,500 beds in this same period of time. Another quick calculation will show that if this enrollment increase occurs (which I wouldn’t bet on), then 4,500 more students will have to find an off-campus residence.

The numbers don’t add up and neither does the sense. If you can make a list of families that want to raise their kids between two houses of students, I would love to see it.  Vacant homes will surround this campus and landlords will have to force higher rent to students because they won’t be able to fill their properties.

In tough economic times, this is unreasonable. When will the city of Lexington and UK recognize the reason this community thrives — UK students — and do something that actually benefits them?