UCA raises dorm, food rates

CONWAY - Room-and-board rates will increase 4.48 percent at the University of Central Arkansas this fall, the school’s board of trustees voted Friday.

The trustees voted unanimously to raise board rates to cover an increase in food-service provider Aramark’s contract and to supplement food-service revenue. The board agreed to raise room rates as well, primarily because of efforts to maintain and improve housing facilities and to cover an increase in the cable-television rate.

The total room-and-board rate for the 2014-15 academic year will be $2,889 per semester, based on a double-occupancy room rate and a total access meal plan. The current rate is $2,765 per semester. Both rates also include a plan that has a $50 declining-cash-balance option, which works like a bank debit card and supplements the weekly meal allowance.

The new board rates still place UCA near the bottom of the price range among Arkansas’ four-year public universities, said Diane Newton, vice president for finance and administration. The new room rates are expected to leave UCA at the midpoint range, she said.

“We’re very competitive,” Newton said.

Newton told trustees that an increase is likely next year, too.

“We’re going to have to do this more than one year,” she said.

The board also approved without discussion a proposal to prohibit electronic cigarettes, often called e-cigarettes, on campus. The new, one-sentence policy says, “The use of any tobacco products and electronic cigarettes is prohibited everywhere on campus and in any vehicle owned or leased by the University.”

The school had already banned tobacco use. But electronic cigarettes do not contain tobacco.

In 2009, the Arkansas Legislature approved a law banning smoking on college and university campuses in the state. Questions have been raised since then about whether that act applies to electronic cigarettes.

A campus committee that studied the issue recommended that the board of trustees ban the battery-operated electronic devices.

In November, Randy Pastor, medical director of UCA’s student health clinic, wrote a letter advising UCA President Tom Courtway of the committee’s decision.

Pastor wrote: “Although the immediate effects on humans of direct or secondhand nicotine vapors emitted by electronic cigarette devices are presently unknown, there is a large concern by the medical community, and other regulating agencies, about the long-term effects of these devices on human health.”