About 30 NIU athletes who signed leases for the partially-completed Stadium View Apartments II want more compensation than the developer is willing to give them.

Senior halfback Mike Strasser said about 18 football players, along with several gymnasts, soccer players and field hockey players, will combine forces and seek extra compensation for costs they must pay while their apartments aren’t finished.

The homeless tenants, who can stay in three DeKalb hotels, with friends or commute, are paid a $25 fee for moving expenses, 65 cents per day for storage fees and $3 a day for food, said Don Friedman, complex manager. Commuting students also receive driving expense compensation.

“That’s outrageous,” Strasser said, commenting on the $3 food allowance. He estimated eating out at fast-food restaurants would cost about $6 per meal for each football player, totaling $18 per day.

Friedman said the food allowance is to make up the difference between shopping for food and dining out. Totaled, the compensation equals about a full month’s rent, he said.

“On the whole, people have been pretty cool” dealing with the temporary quarters, Friedman said.

But Strasser said he plans to contact the Students’ Legal Assistance attorneys to see if the athletes can get extra reimbursement.

Students’ Legal Assistance Director Donald Henderson said landlords have a fundamental obligation to provide replacement housing that’s habitable for tenants at the time their lease begins.

“It’s an individual matter,” Henderson said. “People are going to have different considerations” of what’s adequate. The same sort of delays have happened before on other DeKalb complexes, too, he said.

Two years ago, when Strasser was a sophomore moving into the first Stadium View Apartments, “the same thing happened and they said it wouldn’t happen again,” he said.

Construction delays caused him to live at the Georgetown Motel for nearly a month before he could move in, Strasser said. During that time, he had to dine out for meals and missed the privacy of his own room.

Complex developer Brad Rubeck, of Rubeck and Co., said his company is the same one that built the first Stadium View, and there were delays.

Strasser said living with friends, or in a hotel as he did two years ago, is inconvenient. But the inconvenience is even greater with the Huskie’s first football game against Eastern Illinois University Sept. 1.

“It certainly has been a disruption for them,” said NIU Head Football Coach Jerry Pettibone.

“I’m leaving it up to the individuals to do what they feel is the right thing to do,” Pettibone said.