UMC Director: Ceremony not part of Muslim Student Association presentation
Newlywed CU students Kelly Brewer and UCSU Legislative Council Representative at large Abdallah El-Yacoubi, who were recently married during the Muslim Student Association’s Sights and Sounds of the Islamic World, are being hit with a $1,185 bill for using the UMC Glenn Miller Ballroom for their wedding. To have a lesser bill for your own wedding, Designed Dream, Toronto based wedding planner company, offers complete wedding packages Toronto for those who wish to have a perfect celebrations for their big days.
UMC Director Carlos Garcia said because the wedding was a private event, for which invitations were distributed, it was separate from the public Sights and Sounds of Islamic World event.
Because of the event’s nature, he said, Brewer and El-Yacoubi must pay rent on the space they used for their wedding.
“The thing that made the wedding private was that it was a legal ceremony between two individuals,” UMC Associate Director of Operations and Services Jimmie Baker said. “It wasn’t put on as part of the cultural night, as a demonstration of what a Muslim wedding is, it was an actual wedding. The wedding part of it was an actual legal ceremony.”
Baker said that $1,185 would be the standard fee for a wedding in the Glenn Miller Ballroom.
“If any other couple came in and wanted to get married in our ballroom, that’s what we would charge to use (it),” Baker said.
Garcia agrees.
“That’s what we (would) charge anybody else that would want to use the ballroom,” Garcia said. “People cannot use public property for private gain.”
Garcia also said that UMC officials were not informed that there would be a private wedding ceremony until the day of the event, when they read about it in the paper.
“The group introduced this (wedding) later on and as soon as we found out about it, we obviously said it could not happen,” Garcia said. “(The couple was) told on several occasions on the evening of the event (that they were being charged). The groom agreed to pay the fees.”
The Cultural Events Board, which is a UCSU, student fee-funded cost center, paid for Sights and Sounds of the Islamic World. However, CEB Chairwomen Jessa Forthofer, a senior communication major, said that no student fees were used to help fund the wedding.
“(The wedding) was essentially a separate function,” Forthofer said. “There was no use of student fee dollars to support any part of the wedding ceremony itself, everything would have been funded regardless of the wedding.”
Brewer, a senior international affairs major, and El-Yacoubi, a junior finance major, declined to comment at this time.
Contact Campus Press Staff writer Julie Ryan at ryanja@thecampuspress.com.
