Stephen Lumetta
Contributing Writer
Campus Council (CC) is currently working toward amending the house party policies to ensure that house parties can occur safely and responsibly. According to CC Chair Elliot Wainwright ’15, distinctions need to be made between private parties and public parties. CC will amend the current policy to include these distinctions.
CC is working to identify an occupancy threshold that would determine whether a house is a permissible venue for an open party or not.
Currently, CC is considering a threshold of anywhere from 50 to 75 people, but that value needs to be studied and discussed further before CC agrees upon it.
“Essentially what we’re doing is opening up the houses again for open parties, depending on the house,” said Wainwright. “We’re trying to make it so that we can open up the large houses but not necessarily have an open party in Johnson House.”
“For a party to have to be registered, if it’s closed, is double the occupancy of the people in the house,” said CC Vice Chair Luke Tonat ’15. Otherwise, the private party would not need to be registered under the proposed policy change.
For example, Johnson House has an occupancy of eight. If 20 people were expected, the party would need to be registered (If a group’s expectations of a party exceeds the planned venue’s occupancy limit, Campus Life will direct it to a larger venue). But what would happen if only 12 people were expected to show up and 20 showed up the night of the event?
“If it goes over the threshold in this impromptu sort of thing, you call security and notify [them], and you have amnesty,” said Tonat, referring to the proposed policy amendment.
“The entire idea behind the whole thing is trying to increase communication with security so they have an idea of what’s going on, because it’s always when they don’t know what’s going on [that] people start getting in trouble,” Wainwright said. “If [the party] were to keep growing and go above fire code level, that’s when you need to start working this, trying to bring the numbers of people down. And in the same way, if you need help to do that, call and ask for help.”
CC hopes to have the fire code occupancy number of each house either printed on a sign by the entrance or painted near the entrances to all houses so that it is clearly visible.
Last night, after press-time, a fireside chat was held to gather student opinions and to educate the campus community on what CC has been working on to amend the policies.
Ideally, the Judicial Committee will continue to work on the details. The group plans to submit the final plan to CC for approval in late October or early November.