The editorial is the opinion of the editorial board of The Daily Eastern News.

Resuming a limited service for the Panther Express seemed to be the logical answer for senate members Wednesday night.

The problem is, we are now paying H&H Transportation twice as much money for half the service.

To begin with, H&H broke their contract with the university. Why are we rewarding them with continued service? In a normal situation, if a company breaks a contract, no one is going to continue to give them their business.

Originally, it seemed that H&H was the only group that could provide service for such a low price, but that was because the bid didn’t match the required workload.

Laidlaw, among other services, did not return bids for a contract for the next six weeks. Laidlaw told The Daily Eastern News that running a service for six weeks would be infeasible. And it is. But it seems foolish to award the next six weeks to a company that has already burned the university.

It is hard to place blame in a scenario like this one. The administration is at fault for not making sure a performance bond, which would help ensure fulfillment of the contract, was received from H&H Transportation. But to its credit, Eastern was attempting to please the students.

The student fee was raised to $5.60 after the shuttle bus bids were returned. The only other bid Eastern received was for about $112,000 a semester, twice as much as H & H’s bid.

It is impractical that the students would have favored an increase in the shuttle bus fee to about $11.20 per student, which is at least what would be needed to pay for the only other bid.

The administration, along with Student Government members, chose to take the cheap option and hope, and now the students are paying the price. So is the students’ lack of a willingness to pay for a bus to blame, or is the administration’s inexperience with running a university shuttle system to blame?

At this point the best option for everyone may be to learn from these costly mistakes and do a more professional job in finding a service for next year.