The Standing Committee on Student Affairs recently proposed the possibility of getting an anti-slip treatment on the bricks after considering the safety issues of the slippery surface in the Brickyard. The project did not follow through due to high costs of the treatment. As a component of Student Government, the committee acts as an intermediary between the student body and student senate, working to resolve issues and improve student living.

Nina Kudlak, chair of the Student Affairs Committee and a third-year studying political science, said the issue arose at a recent meeting.

“We spoke about the Brickyard slipping issue at our committee meeting a few weeks ago,” Kudlak said. “We were all sitting around a table discussing issues that we have seen on campus. … We were all like, ‘Wow, all of us have slipped on the Brickyard before, and it’s really awful.’”

Kudlak said one of her committee members brought up the idea of providing a protective coating for the bricks to prevent this issue.

“We were gonna reach out to facilities to find out about silica-based chemicals for the water on the bricks,” Kudlak said.

According to Kudlak, Harshal Vala, a member of the committee and a graduate student in electrical engineering, said the coating would cost too much to keep up with because of the frequency of which it would have to be redone.

“[They] had all kind of come to the consensus that it would be way [too] expensive of a project,” Kudlak said. “We were like, ‘Is it even worth it to consider this as one of our initiatives?’”

Aurian Bayat, a fourth-year studying political science and philosophy, argued such expenditures would be worth it, considering where other university funds go.

“If there’s money to spend on landscaping then … there should be money to spend for things that make campus safer,” Bayat said.

Bayat said he broke his ankle while riding a scooter on campus two years ago. It had rained a day or so prior, and most of the bricks were dry, but some remained slippery. Bayat recounted seeing others slip in the brickyard.

While slipping on bricks is a problem the Student Affairs Committee sees validity in, members deem it an issue that isn’t possible to fix.

“That’s something that we have talked about that ultimately we kind of shot down just because of the cost association,” Kudlak said.

Kudlak said the possibility of fixing this issue was brought up in passing.

“This was something that we talked about one time at a committee meeting like two weeks ago,” Kudlak said. “I hadn’t heard of any real plans to get anything happening to fix this issue.”

Although the anti-slip treatment for the Brickyard is no longer being discussed, the Student Affairs Committee briefly discussed other ideas to curtail the issue.

“One of the things that we thought about was the Physical Master Plan Committee, which is this committee of faculty and staff that works together and discusses future changes for the physicality of NC State,” Kudlak said. “So we thought about maybe bringing that issue to them.”

However, since the committee has not had another meeting since the initial discussion surrounding this issue, the resolution to this problem is still pending.