INSIDE PROJECT 2000: Project 2000 envisions safer U., cashless campus, new residences

With the approval of all but four proposals of Project 2000 last Sunday night, the Undergraduate Assembly has given to the administration what UA Chairperson and Wharton junior Dan Debicella said is the most important accomplishment of the body this decade. The UA spent the entire first semester on the recommendations contained in the project. According to Debicella, the UA will now invest much energy lobbying the administration to adopt the proposals. But much of Project 2000 has yet to be explained to the University community as a whole. The plan is divided into eleven sections. Each section includes several recommendations pertaining to specific areas of the University. There are 25 such recommendations in the document, and on Sunday, the UA approved 21 of these. Project 2000 was written by 18 UA members. Debicella revised and combined all the recommendations into the final form, he said. While many of the proposals in the plan are not ground-breaking, Debicella said they are not meant to be. Instead, Project 2000 is meant to focus University attention on a number of proposals that have been discussed before but never implemented. One of these proposals is a plan to convert the University into a "cashless campus" by turning the PennCard into a debit card, Debicella said. If this proposal becomes reality, students will be able to pay for everything on campus with their PennCards. Debicella said students would benefit from increased convenience and safety if this were implemented. A debit card would allow students to put money on their PennCard at the beginning of the year and make purchases using it -- with the cost of each purchase being removed from the money on the PennCard, according to Debicella. Currently, the new Chats coffee house uses this system. The University Bookstore employs a similar system -- allowing students to charge purchases of $25 or more to their bursar accounts. Debicella said he hopes to see the entire campus and surrounding stores using the debit card system by the fall of 1998. Project 2000 calls for laundry service and vending machines in University buildings to allow students to use their PennCards by the fall of this year. Another part of Project 2000 recommends that Dining Services also move towards a system that more closely resembles a debit card. A debit card has been proposed before, but was determined not to be economically feasible, Debicella said. He added that he has "seen things" that show that such a proposal would now be possible. Another recommendation written by Debicella deals with campus safety and the distribution of University Police officers. Project 2000 suggests that the University Police change their current system of patrolling so that police officers become more familiar with specific areas of the campus. "The idea is to create a neighborhood cop," Debicella said. "We're proposing that a group of policemen be assigned to a specific area for six months to a year." He added that rather than patrolling in cars, police would be on bikes or walking, so their presence will be more known. Debicella said he has discussed the recommendation with University Police Commissioner John Kuprevich, and that it is "along the lines" of what the police administration has planned. Project 2000 also includes a recommended course of action for the administration to follow if a college house system is implemented at the University. UA Secretary and College sophomore Mosi Bennett said the UA was worried that a college house system could be harmful to student life if implemented in the wrong way. "These are things that students don't want, and that the UA feels would destroy certain aspects of social life at this school," he said. But Bennett said a college house proposal would not necessarily be damaging. "There are many benefits to the college house system," he said. "The ability to have access to services through dorms, more contact with professors, an identity with a house? [These are] something that is lacking under the system we have now."