Months of bickering came to an end last week as the administration and student representatives on the Council on Student Services agreed to temporarily increase ancillary student fees to cover the cost of running the Varsity Centre (and its Bubble) over the next year.

Or the unions that showed up at least. The Graduate Students’ Union and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students were not represented at the COSS meeting, held on the morning of April 5 at Hart House.

APUS president Murphy Brown said that her board and members of APUS present at their meeting felt that going back to vote on the issue again would be pointless, and that their position was unchanged from the first COSS meeting on the issue, in which APUS representatives voted against the fee increase.

Last week’s COSS meeting came after student representatives on the council voted down the proposed budget for the faculty of physical education and health in March. The budget contained a $20 fee hike for full-time students, which student representatives felt had come without sufficient consultation.

After administrators threatened to rent out the place to make up the $900,000 per year in maintenance costs, student unions asked for time to seek their members’ input on it. COSS reconvened last week to propose an add-on to the phys ed budget.

And COSS members who did show up seemed satisfied by the outcome.

“This is a creative compromise by the students’ association,” said faculty of physical education and health dean Bruce Kidd. “I would like to thank [SAC] for working to come to this solution.”

At the meeting, the SAC (soon to be UTSU) representatives moved for the fee increase of $18-as opposed to the $20 increase struck down at the previous COSS meeting-to be placed temporarily for the 2007-08 academic year before it is referred to an online plebiscite for the students to decide whether they want to pay for the facility.

“I am optimistic that the students will want to keep the Bubble after a year of using it,” said dean Kidd.

SAC chairperson-elect Andrea Armborst struck a more populist chord. “I am looking forward to seeing how the students vote at the end of the year,” she said.

The revised phys ed budget remains to be approved at Governing Council’s university affairs board meeting on April 17.