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Fire in State Gym results in closing By Makayla.Tendall @iowastatedaily.com

Charlie Coffey/Iowa State Daily

Firemen from the Ames Fire Department account for their gear after entering State Gym to clean up after a fire on Sunday. The fire started in the sauna, and the firemen removed all of the dangerous parts.

A fire broke out in the sauna in State Gym just after 10:30 a.m. Sunday. Michael Giles, director of recreation services, and Rich Higgins, deputy fire chief for the Ames Fire Department, said they do not yet know what caused the fire or how serious the damage from it is. The most visible damage

from the fire was the smoke that filled the building. Giles said that around the time smoke could be smelled, the fire alarm was triggered, alerting the fire department. Staff evacuated the 250 to 300 people in the gym in about three minutes, Giles said. The fire department extinguished the fire immediately, then worked to take apart the sauna and take the materials outside of the building. Higgins said the department

removes materials involved in a fire so they cannot continue to burn and damage a building. Fire doors prevented the smoke from filling the skywalk and leaching into Beyer Hall. Giles said State Gym is evacuated two or three times a year because of false alarms, but said this is the first fire State Gym has experienced. Higgins said the fire department is working to ventilate the building by controlling the air flow and increasing the air pres-

sure in the building. By opening only one door the smoke is forced out through one opening. Higgins and Giles said the next step after ventilation is investigating how the fire started. Giles said they will then determine how much damage, if any, was done. Giles said he is not yet sure how long State Gym will be closed, but Beyer Hall and Lied Recreation Athletic Center will remain open.

Carefully crafted

In location and atmosphere, The District sets itself apart By Hannah.Postlethwait @iowastatedaily.com

etween the blocks of Welch and Hayward Avenues, a passerby’s attention may be diverted to a small, red building with a 9-foot Christmas tree punctually displayed in its window. A rustic sign above the door reads, “The District,” and inside is home to a relatively new bar in Campustown. The District opened for business Jan. 15 for its first-ever mug night. Brandon Fick bought the bar October 2014, and the construction process lasted three or four months. The District replaced what used to be Charlie Yoke’s. The District recently started featuring mugs of their own. The mug costs $5 to purchase and comes with a permanent discount: $4 Long Islands on Thursdays, as long as the mug isn’t lost or stolen. Inside, the atmosphere is quite unlike what some bargoers have come to expect. The familiar aspects of the bar scene accompanied by the unwelcoming stench of yesterday’s beer are something The District lacks. That’s exactly what Brandon Fick, bar owner, expects. “It sounds like such a small thing, but realistically, when you walk inside [a bar] and it’s dirty, or beat-up, or poorly planned, it takes away from the experience,” he said. “There’s obviously a different aesthetic to this bar than there is to any other type of bar,” said Devon Jefferson, junior in journalism and mass communication. The bar features three supervisors: Brandon Fick as the owner; his cousin Josh Fick as manager and Shane Hennessey, the bar manager. The dynamic among all of them is laid back and sup-

Jordan Zugmaier/Iowa State Daily

The District is the newest bar to come to Campustown. The bar opened in January and while it participated in an Ames tradition of “mug night,” it just recently started to feature mugs of its own. The District is owned by Brandon Fick on 2518 Lincoln Way.

portive. Josh Fick said he and Hennessey, senior in marketing, handle different aspects of managing The District as a team, and have a mutual ability to learn from one another. “We care,” Josh Fick said. “We care about the little things here. That goes for every single aspect — every piece of wood, every single pint glass — in this bar.” He said there are days he could spend a couple hours just doing “little things” such as using Pledge to clean the bar. The District serves 16-ounce pints, as opposed to most bars that serve drinks in 10 to 12-ounce plastic cups, Brandon Fick said.

Aside from that, both Brandon and Josh Fick agreed their prices are comparable to almost any other bar in Ames. “We had higher prices for a while. People noticed the higher prices, not the bigger drink,” Brandon Fick said. “Now our prices are very comparable — if not identical — to most places.” The bar currently has Budweiser tap beers. They’re one of two bars in Iowa that serves Natural Light on tap; they have to special order it. The District also serves Exile beer on tap, which is brewed locally in Des Moines.

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Design: Chelsey Crile/Iowa State Daily

Search for EO director begins By Audra.Kincart @iowastatedaily.com

Jordan Zugmaier/Iowa State Daily

Campustown Action Association has provided surveys about adding cameras to the area. The cameras would be installed to protect residents’ safety, and Sgt. Joel Congdon of the Ames Police Department said there are positives and negatives of the proposal.

Camera survey released Campustown prepares for potential safety provisions in near future By Elizabeth.Gray @iowastatedaily.com New fixtures may find their way to Campustown, but these fixtures won’t only be looked at. They’ll also look back. The Campustown Action Association, or CAA, was asked by the city of Ames to send a survey to the nearby residents of Campustown about the possibility of putting security cameras in areas of Campustown. The survey was distributed to local residents a few weeks ago and will be sent out to ISU students within the next week or so. Only a few hundred people have taken this survey, so the true results of it and the actions that will be taken are unclear at the moment. CAA hopes to get the vast majority of 42,000 residents, including students, to reply to

this survey before taking any action on the matter. So far, CAA is content with the number of participants and the results it’s received. However, it expects far more citizens to participate in the next few weeks. Rebecca Olson, director of CAA, described the difficulty of getting the survey out to students in a timely matter. Since CAA is not a student entity, it takes a lot of time to reach out to all of the students at Iowa State and to get the approval to do so. However, since a large portion of Ames residents who visit Campustown are in-fact students, the importance of getting their opinion on the installation of security cameras is crucial. “A large majority of residents who either reside or visit Campustown are students,” Olson said. “It would be unfair to change their living situation without their input. We want to

reach out to students because their opinions matter to the city of Ames.” Olson said there is no specific reason or event that occurred in Campustown that perpetuated the possibility of a camera addition, but rather the city feels like safety is always a concern. For the well-being of the city’s students, putting security cameras in Campustown is another way to make the area a safer place to live. Because there is no estimated final results from the survey, it’s unclear where the cameras will be installed if the majority of residents agree with the proposal. Sgt. Joel Congdon of the Ames Police Department expressed the major positives and negatives of having security cameras in local communities. Congdon said that this is generally a passionate topic for

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Iowa State started a national search for a new director for the Office of Equal Opportunity. Dawn Bratsch-Prince, associate provost, and Calli Sanders, senior associate athletics director for sports administration, are in charge of leading the search committee. “That office manages all the different aspects of equal opportunity programs and affirmative action programs for the university,” Bratsch-Prince said. “That would include the university is in compliance with all the different laws with affirmative action and equal opportunity.” Bratsch-Prince went on to explain that the Office of Equal Opportunity does a variety of other tasks including investigating Title IX complaints and aiming to resolve them through co-working with other units on campus that ensure the university is true to what it says. The Office of Equal Opportunity is also in charge of all the diversity training for faculty and staff. “It’s really a partnership; we work together to identify areas we can improve,” Bratsch-Prince said. Maureen De Armond, member of the search committee and associate counsel, explained the importance of the Office of Equal Opportunity.

“Those policies are important to ensure we don’t have unlawful discrimination of hiring students and admission of students,” De Armond said. “Affirmative Action is more of a policy that strives to help us with diversity in our employment purposes as well.” De Armond also said the Office of Equal Opportunity works hand-in-hand with the ISU Police Department and Student Affairs to investigate reports of violent acts on campus, including sexual assault. De Armond said the difference between the vice president of diversity and inclusion and the role of the Office of Equal Opportunity is the Office of Equal Opportunity takes on more of an investigative component than the vice president of diversity and inclusion “I would envision the chief diversity officer looking more at strategy and goals and community building,” De Armond said. “[The Office of Equal Opportunity] does do education and outreach, but I think their time is limited on the extent they can do those things on a proactive basis.” The search committee is looking for a candidate with experience in higher education and wants a diverse pool of about 20 candidates. The applications are being reviewed Monday and finalists will be brought to campus around the end of January and beginning of February.