By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 27, 2013
Last week I published an article on UFV SUS’s soon-to-be-abolished My Safe Ride Home (MSRH) program, an article that took me nearly a month to research and write, as well as forcing me to make numerous long distance calls at your (students’) expense.
The day after it was published I walked into the SUS office and asked if any of the board members present were worried about my comprehensive analysis of one of the biggest SUS blunders in recent history.
“No,” one member said, “your article’s too complicated for anyone to understand.”
I took that as a challenge.
Here are (in my opinion) the four most important things that you as student need to know about the MSRH program, explained so simply that my cat, who routinely forgets where his food-bowl is, understood them instantly:
The My Safe Ride Home program is NOT a scam.
There is a rumour circulating at the moment that SUS is being fleeced for hundreds of thousands by a shady group of entrepreneurs who stumbled onto the cash cow that is the UFV student body. This is not true. MSRH has been tested and tried in other circumstances (most recently by the Waterloo Regional School Board in Ontario) and it does work – it’s just not very efficient. And frankly, the people involved in this program are important, respected figures in the Lower Mainland. They can no more afford to scam you than you can afford to be scammed.
The problem with the MSRH model is that the pay-off, for the consumer, is simply not worth the investment. The backers of MSRH have poured hundreds of thousand into developing secure software with GPS synchronization that allows their cards to be swiped like a debit or credit card – all to save a student (best case scenario) 10 minutes waiting for a taxi. If the $25 taxi credit were part of a group of essential core services provided by the program (and MMC has been desperately trying to add services since MSRH was launched), I might find it more valuable, but as it stands MSRH is cost-prohibitive and reward-deficient. The program is really only valuable to a student in a crisis with no cash, no credit card, no debit card and no friends who could help with any of the above – but how often does that combination really occur? Is it worth a mandatory $25 per student?
In 2009, your UFV SUS signed a contract to create MSRH, apparently without reading the contract.
The real problem of the MSRH program has never really been the program itself, but instead the blunders SUS has made interpreting and amending the contract with MMC. It is very clearly stated in the contract that a student’s enrolment in the MSRH lasts a single year, and therefore their $25 credit is active only for a single year. For some reason, your UFV SUS decided at the end of 2010 that they either had (a) misinterpreted the contract, or (b) no longer liked the contract, and instead desired the MSRH credit to last for the entirety of a student’s time at UFV. How the board could either play along for a year-and-a-half completely ignorant of how the contract worked, or abruptly decide they no longer agreed with the contract (not even two years into a five-year term), is beyond the understanding of this humble reporter. The fact that they did, and that the program spent the next year in contractual limbo, is a major reason for the imminent cancellation of the program in April
Your UFV SUS finds math scary difficult.
Some of you learned this last November during the EGM that “saved” AfterMath, but it’s disturbing to see this numerical nonsense as a general SUS trend rather than an isolated incident. In October 2010, SUS got a check from the MSRH program for $105,000, or half of the program’s profit from the first year of operation. If the program was meant to last the entirety of a student’s time at UFV, there was no possible way for 8400 students ($105,000 divided by SUS’s take of $12.50 per student) to have “left” the program after a single year. To add to the problem, SUS had not actually created a mechanism to determine when a student had indeed “left” the program short of (presumably) graduation. Simply put, any SUS board member active in 2010/2011 who claims they misunderstood the program to last for the entirety of a student’s UFV enrolment could never responsibly have cashed that check. And any board member who cashed the check could not have ethically claimed two months later that they misunderstood the program.
Of course, even after the renegotiation of the contract, SUS still didn’t bother to institute a mechanism for tracking student enrolment (even though such a mechanism was assumed in the new agreement).
Your UFV SUS negotiated MSRH with no regards for basic principles of business.
Now some of this mess can be attributed to the fact that the MSRH program has been supervised by four different boards and three different SUS managers, but even so there are some scary blunders. In 2009, MMC approached the SUS board with the MSRH program and not a single signed contract with any other major institution. After SUS became the first major contract for the whole MSRH program, your SUS handed over roughly $225,000 of student money without supervision and without an escrow clause to ensure that the “profit” money would be protected from possible bankruptcy. In short they locked themselves into a five-year deal with a business model that had yet to prove itself, gambling with your money.
In the last contract amendment in 2012 that negotiated the eventual termination of the contract, SUS agreed to invoice MMC for SUS’s half of the profit at the end of the April 2013. This would be fine, except that SUS agreed to invoice MMC based on the numbers MMC provided which SUS has no way of verifying. In this scenario, MMC doesn’t only hold all the cards, but the entire pot as well (and possibly the table, the house, the children and the wedding photos). As any first-year business student (or, frankly, an above-average dolphin) could tell you, this is not good business.
In short, if the MSRH program was not run by respectable people, SUS (bankrolled by you and me) could have been very screwed. Hopefully by the end of May or so SUS will receive back the appropriate portion of the profit moneys and the circus that has been the UFV’s MSRH program will simply be a bad dream. But the question remains, why do we persist with a student governance model that allows this kind of scenario to perpetuate itself? Who is going to change the system?
