News in Brief

9/19/12 7:00pm

Trespasser by RMC 

An individual soliciting magazines in front of the Rice Memorial Center was issued a criminal trespassing warning on Tuesday afternoon around 2 p.m., Rice University Police Department Captain Clemente Rodriguez said. The individual may have also been harassing students while soliciting magazines, he said. Rice does not allow solicitation on campus. The warning states that should the individual return to campus, he or she will be considered to be trespassing, Rodriguez said. 

-Brooke Bullock 

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RMC Bathrooms

The Rice Memorial Center's restroom renovations have been delayed due to budget and construction issues, but the restrooms are set to open by the Centennial Weekend, assistant dean of students and director of the student center and campus-wide programs Boyd Beckwith said. 

"The budget that was approved was nowhere near the budget that we were going in with, partially because there's a glimmer of hope that this entire building would be renovated," Beckwith said. "The process of finding a contractor who could do the things that we wanted at a price we could afford took us much longer than expected."

The renovations include additional stalls, improved lighting, a drop-tile ceiling and a new air handler, which circulates air through the restroom, Boyd said. 

"We found that the air handlers for those restrooms were original to the building," Beckwith said. "They were 54 years old. You can imagine how ineffective they are at this point, so we had to coordinate a separately funded maintenance project to replace just the air handlers at the same time as the contractors are renovating the restrooms."

According to Boyd, a plywood barrier was originally in place to prevent people from climbing between the restrooms, and in the process of renovation, contractors replaced this barrier with a new, fire-retardant one. 

"With drop tiles, it's really easy to get up into the ceiling, so we had to have a barrier go between the two restrooms," Boyd said. "It was for security concerns that we needed a barrier, and to have a barrier, we needed one that was up to fire code. We did not actually have any fire code violations. The restructuring had nothing to do with the fire code."

-Michael He 

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