About 60 students, mostly ASG senators, were on hand at ASG’s Senate meeting in Fisk 217 to hear Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl and Aldermen Jane Grover and Delores Holmes field questions regarding the “three-unrelated” ordinance Wednesday night.
Tisdahl made an effort to dispel the “misinformation” that she said has been distributed since the fiasco started in mid-January.
“We’re not in the business of evicting our residents,” Tisdahl said. “No one wants to see these apartments go empty. At the same time, we have to look out for the safety of students doubling and tripling up in insufficient housing.”
The officials fielded about ten questions during the one-hour block that ASG reserved in the Senate meeting for the talk. Along with Grover and Holmes, Tisdahl managed to keep a cooperative atmosphere intact with the senators in attendance. Although Speaker of the Senate Tyris Jones seemed to scrap the previous plan to ask prepared, written questions, the open dialogue largely avoided the incendiary shouting matches that marked last month’s fervent town hall meeting.
Outside of reassuring students that three or more unrelated students living together would not be actively tracked down, Tisdahl and the officials called on Northwestern students to show up at the polls and to drop the feud that’s existed between city and school for generations.
“It’s time for us to get past that, and I’m ready to do it if you are,” Tisdahl said. “These problems can easily be remedied with a healthy line of communication, and we’re on the right path with meetings like this.”