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October 28, 2021
Vol. 120 NO. 5
Understaffing at dining services causes problems:
Employees and students complain about long lines, reduced options, food quality and more By Libby Williams, Laynie Erickson Scene Editor & Staff Reporter If you’ve walked through the SURC Dining area since fall quarter began, you’ve probably heard rumblings of discontent about Dining Services. Students who rely on dining services for all of their meals say they’re tired of waiting in long lines and have noticed a decline in food quality since last year. Dining Service employees say they’re feeling overworked, overlooked and underappreciated. Dining Services is severely understaffed this quarter, with just a little over halfthestudentemployeesaswhatthey’ve had in previous years, around 250 versus the usual “400 plus,” according to Director of Dining Services Dean Masuccio. “We’re still in need of another probably 40 to 50 students that continue to fill in the gaps that we’ve experienced,” Masuccio said. The Observer spoke to four current and four former Dining Service employees and a dozen diners to get a sense of the problems and how they are being addressed. Longlinesandmobile ordering Understaffing has led to excessive wait times at most dining loca-
By Stephen Martin Staff Reporter Three of Ellensburg’s seven city council seats are up for election on Nov. 2. Two positions are between current council members and opposing candidates, whereas one is between two new candidates as the current council member is retiring. Photos taken by Danny Dang/The Observer, Lines in Central Marketplace can often be seen wrapping around the entrance.
tions. Mobile ordering, which was useful during the 2020-2021 school year with the reduced number of students living on campus, has backed up completion of in-person orders, according to employees. “The lines are also insanely long during most times of the day,” a student surveyed by The Observer said. An employee who has been working multiple dining stations at Central Marketplace for two years said, “We’re dealing with people that are in-person ordering food, but then we’re also having online peo-
ple. So trying to do all of it at once, it’s a lot busier compared to last year. There was mobile ordering, but because not many students were on campus, it wasn’t that busy. But being at full capacity, having students out there in the dining hall while trying to do online orders, we got a lot busier.” This employee, like others The Observer spoke with, asked to remain anonymous due to a concern about job security. Masuccio said that mobile ordering was introduced in the fall of
2020, and was fast tracked to campus during COVID-19 in order to, “come up with some remedies to help with expediting the service and just keeping congestion minimal in the dining hall and other locations, so that went well. But we realized that the mobile ordering solution that we had selected likely wasn’t the best long term fit. So therefore GrubHub was brought on and has helped with a lot of the same things that we brought on the previous version.”
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Brooks Library defaced with homphobic slurs and partisan political statements By Star Diavolikis News Editor Brooks Library staff discovered Sharpie grafitti throughout the library consisting of “partisan political statements and homophobic language,” according to the Dean of Libraries Rebecca Lubas. This writing was found in the back stairwell, in the elevator and in the maps room on Thursday night. The graffiti in the stairwell and elevator were found Thursday night, and upon further inspection, the graffiti in the map
Three positions open for City Council election
room was found early Friday. Both the police and custodial calls were made Friday morning. “It’s actually very frequently, unfortunately, that we deal with graffiti in the library,” Lubas said. “But the upsetting stuff about this was that, you know, it really was hate speech. After the fact that we had the incident this summer, with the rainbow flag, it’s particularly upsetting that this has happened more than once on our campus and in our community in a short space of time … [The library is] supposed to be a safe and wel-
coming space, and this type of language violated the very core of what we’re trying to do at the library, let alone at Central.” In efforts to recover from this event, Lubas said the library will be attempting to co-sponsor events with the Womens and Gender Studies group. A teachin will be held on a to be determined date in November, which includes informal lectures, readings and creative works all done by LGBTQ staff, students and faculty. The library will also be starting book giveaways every week
until the end of the quarter. The book giveaways will consist of LGBTQ titles, and for Halloween, the library will be giving away the graphic novel “Cemetery Boys,” and one of the main characters is transgender. “We’re hoping to co-sponsor some events that they’ll have to teach about the LGBTQ community and their contributions to the community,” Lubas said. “That’s one way that I think we can help, by providing support … We want people to be welcome and feel seen and feel valued.”
Position 1 Position 1 is between current council member Nancy Lillquist and candidate Kip Storey. Lillquist has served on the Ellensburg City Council since 2001. She has a Bachelor’s degree in geology from CWU and a Master’s in water resource management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lillquist said she first decided to run for the city council because of what she felt was a natural extension of her previous involvement in public service. “I was a member of the League of Women Voters, and I was a member of Ellensburg City Library Board,” Lillquist said. “So I had kind of a natural affinity toward public policy kinds of issues, so it seemed like a good next step to become involved at a higher level in city government and public policy making.” She said one of her proudest achievements as a member of the city council has been changing the way that Ellensburg designs its neighborhoods. “One of the things I noticed early on was how we were building our neighborhoods and they weren’t connected, and the streets were wide, and it didn’t feel like the way the core of Ellenburg was,” Lillquist said. “And so through a long process of convening a group of stakeholders, and working through the issues, we now are building neighborhoods that connect.”
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