After nearly a month of nail biting and negotiating, the College has agreed to fix the faulty oven hood in the Pyle Inn co-operative kitchen this summer. This decision came after a period of uncertainty as to whether there was enough money in the budget to correct the problem before the summer of 2007. Until the College determined that the issue needed more immediate attention, it had planned to wait until next summer to fix the hood.

“We’ve very happy,” said Caleb Baker, Oberlin Student Cooperative Association president and College junior. “The College did a great job giving us the resources we needed, and the Pyle members were dreamy about all this; they sent me thank you notes and were so sweet to me.”

While the problems with the Pyle oven hood have only recently become public, the College has known about its need for repair for quite some time.

“We were aware that the oven hood needed to be fixed before the fire inspection. However, we believed that the hood could wait until the summer of 2007 to be repaired,” said Operations Manager and OSCA Liaison Michele Gross.

However, the problem escalated faster than the ResEd team had imagined, and new building project regulations left the College in a bind when it came to assessing the feasibility of fixing the oven hood in the near future.

“What made the issue more complicated was the inception of the new housing Master Plan, which has dictated that all renovations on major buildings not start up again until summer of 2007.”

The Master Plan refers to the process of assessing all buildings on campus to improve the quality of College housing, and may call for de-densification, the breaking down of quads and conversion of doubles to singles. The assessment will determine which few residence halls will undergo massive reconstruction, and until those decisions have been made, major projects will remain at a standstill. The renovation of the Keep kitchen is an exception since that decision was made before the Master Plan was announced.

College President Nancy Dye speculated that one argument against fixing the oven hood in Pyle might have been the worry that, should Asia House be chosen as one of the halls to be renovated, it might not make sense to undertake one smaller construction project when every problem would be fixed a year later all at once.

“The thought would be that there shouldn’t be any minor projects if there would be a big renovation project later on,” she explained, while stressing that her involvement in the Pyle Inn proceedings was extremely limited.

What Gross and other analysts were able to ultimately determine, however, was that the cost of fixing the oven hood in Pyle Inn would not exceed the cost of a “major project,” and was thus a project the College could afford this year.

“We started getting cost estimates the very day we learned about the fire inspection,” Gross emphasized, partly in response to rumors that ResEd did not immediately investigate how much money was needed to fix the problem.

Gross also expressed her confusion over rumors saying that the College was at risk of breaching its contract with OSCA. Baker clarified OSCA’s stance on the matter.

“The College provides housing and cooking at a level commensurate to Central Dining Services,” Baker said. “For this semester, the outdoor grill and extra cooking equipment ResEd gave us were working great, but they wouldn’t work next semester when it gets cold and outdoor cooking isn’t an option. We didn’t even know what the fire marshal would say at the next inspection.”

Therefore, if the College decided not to fix the oven hood this summer, there would be no suitable cooking alternative for Pyle Inn in the winter months, which would make contract negotiations a possible course of action.

“I think in the end, not wanting to deal with the problem of contract negotiations in preparation for the fall worked in our favor,” Baker said.

However, Gross noted, “I think, if it had come to that, we would have worked it out.”