In a blog post yesterday, I discussed use of Rec Sports money to fund the NatUp campaign, and the Herald’s news department followed up with a story on that today. It was my assumption that Rec Sports was using seg fees, but a commenter claimed otherwise:

Seg fees are not being used in any way to fund NatUP campaigning. Only private gifts funds to Rec Sports are being used, and all current seg fees are only used to support the operating expenses of each facility.

Well, I’ll wait to see Rec Sports’ budget before I totally believe that, but given the sly way this campaign has been run, it’s not surprising that Rec Sports would know better than to use seg fees.

But the same commenter goes on to say:

Tearing down and completely rebuilding the SERF would be extremely expensive. The NAT expansion and renovation project was chosen because of the available space on lakeshore, the newly approved residence hall being built, and for a lesser cost overall.

Yes, rebuilding the SERF would cost an enormous amount of money. But here’s the thing: That is going to happen, and it’s probably going to need to happen sooner rather than later. The state of the SERF is a more pressing issue to students right now, and even if NatUp passes, that’s not going to change.

Which means that later on this decade, when the SERF has been totally pushed to its limits as population density in downtown Madison increases with more and more students, a campaign for a new SERF will start, and seg fees will probably have to be used for that. Meaning that by the mid 2020s, students could be paying well over $220 a year for exercise facilities — probably more like $300-$400 given the fact that the SERF won’t be cheap.

This means there will be a huge resistance to a second seg fee increase to do the SERF, and Rec Sports will have to compromise by building a smaller scale facility or doing some renovations to the current SERF.

So, let’s do this right. Let’s vote down NatUp today, let’s find some private funding to do minor renovations to the Nat, and let’s propose a new, state-of-the-art SERF on Johnson Street next to Gordon Commons to be funded by private donations and seg fees. See today’s Herald story on City Council’s approval of Gordon Commons for what the current plans for that location are. Doesn’t that look just ripe for a brand, spanking new gym?

That is something I could get behind–even if it is a bigger seg fee increase, it insures that students will have a great facility that is centrally located by the 2020s — instead of one where you can walk outside in the summer and smell cow manure.