I don’t usually read The Poly as intensely as I did last week because I don’t often see things that imminently affect me. Last week’s cover article concerning a new public safety fee caught my eye, and I thought, “Maybe I can use some dimensional analysis to see if this makes sense. If nothing else, I will be able to apply something I learned in class to real life.” While I do not believe that Troy should be charging RPI additional money for fire department and police funding, upon finishing my calculations, it is apparent to me that if the minimum proposed fee of $50 is placed on students, RPI students will be severely over charged by Troy.

It is common knowledge that RPI tuition is already through the roof and continues to go up every year. The new fee under consideration will increase staffing of the fire department and increase the Troy police that patrol campus. How often the fire department saves the RPI campus from certain doom, I do not know, but I have only seen them in action when called by accident to turn off the sprinkler system in Russell Sage Dining Hall.

In regard to police funding, we have our own public safety force to exclusively watch over our campus. We do not need to hire Troy police who will serve us in addition to the rest of Troy. RPI has no problem increasing students’ tuition. If they thought that hiring one or two more public safety officers would stifle campus crime significantly, then it would have been done already.

According to http://salary.com/, the average Troy firefighter makes $40,000 per year. The city wants to hire an additional two firefighters for every shift. In one week there are 168 hours. (168 hours/week)(2 firefighters) = 336 firefighter hours/week. Assuming this salary applies to a 40-hour work week, we can calculate the number of firefighter shifts. Firefighter shifts = (336 firefighter hours/week)/(40 hours/week) = 8.4 firefighter shifts. (8.4 firefighter shifts)($40,000/year) = $336,000/year to have two additional firefighters present on every shift.

Students from Troy will be exempt from the proposed fee. According to page 16 of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — Common Data Set 2007-2008 (http://www.rpi.edu/about/cds/CDS2007_08_Final.pdf), 2 percent of freshmen live off campus or commute. RPI has 7,299 total students. With modest assumptions that not more than 2 percent of the RPI student body (graduate and undergraduate) is from Troy, (.98)(7,299 total students) = 7,153 students who will be paying this fee. If $50 is paid by each student for two semesters this will total (7,153 students)($50/semester)(2 semesters) = $715,300, which is much higher than the $336,000/year calculated above.

Like every resident and institution in Troy, RPI pays taxes. These taxes are supposed to cover fire and police services. To reiterate from last week’s article, “The City of Troy has not requested this of any other institution in the area, such as Russell Sage College or the Emma-Willard School.” Taxation should be equal. If the City of Troy wants more firefighters and police, this writer believes taxes should be raised for the entire city. RPI should not concede to letting Troy extract money from us that can be better spent elsewhere.

Richard Rabin

BIOL ’10