At MUNSU’s board meeting on October 28th, Executive Director of Finance Nathan Gillingham expressed concerns about an increase in fees and a proposed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in current lease agreement negotiations with Memorial.
A lease agreement is a contract between Memorial (the landlord) and MUNSU (the tenant). MUNSU operates “various spaces on campus,” and MUNSU “is a tenant of these spaces,” said Gillingham in an interview with The Muse on October 30th. These spaces would include The Breezeway, The Loft, and The Attic, to name a few.
The previous lease agreement with Memorial expired December 31st, 2025, and can be found here.
For the time being, Gillingham said, “there’s a clause in this lease agreement” that states that “in the absence of a current arrangement…normal terms will just continue.”
During Gillingham’s work report, he mentioned that the university wants MUNSU to sign an MOU. While they aren’t exactly against an MOU, Gillingham explained that they are apprehensive.
The MUNSU exec referenced negotiations between the Graduate Students’ Union and MUN, and a signed and subsequently terminated MOU. The Muse has since spoken to the GSU, and more information can be found in a previous article here.
As well as the MOU, MUNSU is also concerned about demands made in previous lease agreement negotiations, where the university tried to get “a percentage of our revenue, like in the breezeway or in the attic…our revenue generating services.”
This wouldn’t result in an increase in students’ fees per semester because an increase needs to be decided in a referendum. However, Gillingham explained that charging additional fees would make it harder for MUNSU to provide effective services to students:
“This is student money we’re talking about. It’s your money that the university could potentially want to charge more for. We’re not interested in sharing our revenue. All of our revenue that we make in our services goes directly back to our services…It just wouldn’t be fair to students to drown the student organization in additional fees just to operate student-driven services.”
As for the changes that MUNSU would like to see, they want to keep things relatively “status quo” with a few minor changes.
One of those changes would be an offloading of CHMR-FM’s space on the second floor of the North side of the University Centre, as MUNSU no longer funds the radio station. According to Gillingham, this is the only change in space that MUNSU would like to see.
Currently, MUNSU pays $45,000 a year plus HST, although the union is “technically given all of our spaces for free, besides The Breezeway,” Gillingham added. Going forward, MUNSU are not interested in paying additional fees or an increase in rent.
However, there are some operational changes that MUNSU would like to see, such as with Campus Enforcement and Patrol (CEP) who provide security for MUNSU spaces.
Recently, MUNSU have noticed “an inconsistent application of access to our space,” in that CEP officers have been restrictive in that access. This isn’t just relevant to the executive, says Gillingham, because clubs and societies have also had operational issues, such as getting access to spaces they have booked.
So far, negotiations are only in their “preliminary” stages as there have only been two meetings. MUNSU also has yet to see a proposal from the university. During the last meeting, Memorial expressed that they want to produce a draft before Christmas, and then the goal is to have something finalized before the end of MUNSU’s executive term, said Gillingham.
Memorial responded to an enquiry by The Muse and stated:
The lease agreement between Memorial University and MUNSU expired in December 2025. Since that time, the lease has been continued on a month-to-month basis as permitted in the agreement. Members of the university’s Administration and Facilities Management teams met with MUNSU representatives on October 22, 2026, to discuss the lease renewal and support services. Discussions are currently on-going.