Before the College announced that Pyle Inn’s faulty oven hood will be replaced this summer, Oberlin’s campus was rife with rumors about how and if the problem would be corrected. These rumors were mostly centered on the potential cost and whether or not the College had a cut-off point in the amount it was willing to pay as well as the perceived delay in the College’s response.

“Part of the problem was that people wanted information and they wanted it yesterday,” said Director of Finance Ron Watts. “We needed to go in and evaluate. That is not a process that takes a week. It takes about three weeks.”

The funding for the new hood is mostly coming out of the “contingency maintenance,” an unallocated portion of the capital budget to deal with expediencies like a leaking roof or a faulty oven hood. The original contingency budget for this year was $200,000. It’s costing approximately $90,000 - 100,000 to fix the hood.

“It’s not a major project,” said Watts. “A lot of it falls in contingency. We didn’t have any more kitchens. This needed to be fixed.”

Watts conceded that excessive cost was a concern but mostly had to do with the ambiguous status of all residence halls in the face of the Master Plan, which will evaluate what dorms should be renovated — or even demolished — and in what way.

“I don’t want to waste capital,” said Watts. “I don’t want to replace something and then have the Master Plan rip it out.

“If it was $250,000, I don’t know if it would have been done,” said Watts.