An additional 219 men’s basketball season tickets will be made available to Kansas University faculty and staff next year, but longtime ticket holders won’t be able to buy as many tickets as they could in the past under a plan given tentative approval Tuesday.

As controversy continues to percolate over changes in the way season tickets for games in Allen Fieldhouse are distributed, Kansas University’s faculty executive committee Tuesday put its preliminary OK on a framework for how to handle next year’s allocation of 1,646 season tickets.

Under the plan:

• Current season-ticket holders would not lose their tickets.
• Faculty and staff would be limited to no more than two tickets — those with four would be expected to give up two.
• Seniority would decide which faculty and staff get one or two of the additional 219 tickets to be available next year. Seniority also will decide who gets the more preferred seats.
• A lottery system would decide who gets to sit in 12 seats behind and to the side of the visitors’ bench. The lottery pool would be equally divided among faculty, unclassified staff and classified staff.

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Lottery winners would be awarded one ticket to one home game.

“That’s 12 people times 16 (home) games,” Molly Mulloy, administrator of university governance, explained afterward. “That means 192 people who otherwise wouldn’t have a ticket would get to go to a game and sit in a premium seat.”

• Faculty and staff’s 20 percent discount on ticket prices would remain in place.

The framework was approved in response to KU Athletic Corporation’s earlier offer to set aside more seats for faculty and staff and to consolidate the faculty and staff in first- and second-tier seating at the fieldhouse.

Nearly 900 of the 1,427 season tickets now set aside for faculty and staff are for seats in the highest reaches of the fieldhouse.

KU Athletic Director Lew Perkins has said he wanted the University Council to determine how the tickets would be distributed.

“We accepted the offer based on concerns that the athletic department was going to allocate seats on the basis of money,” said committee chairman Ray Davis.

Earlier this year, 121 season ticket holders who had fallen behind in their payments to the Williams Fund were sent letters telling them they had to put up $5,000 or $10,000 to keep their seats. Five of those 121 are plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing the Athletic Corp. of abusing its authority.

Now, the corporation is considering a point system that would allocate prime seats based on donations and other factors.

“So we got into this game because we are more interested in issues of fairness and equity,” said Davis, an associate professor of public administration. “And that’s been the debate so far: How do you best respect the rights of present season-ticket holders and retirees, while at the same time trying to provide new access to as many people as possible?”

Davis said the nine-member committee was open to adjustments and counterproposals.

“This is not final,” he said. “This is only to get something on the table so we can move forward.”

The committee wrestled with — and left unresolved — the ethics of preserving longtime ticket holders’ access to tickets when only a handful of faculty and staff gain access to new tickets each year.

“I’d rather our decisions be based on what’s just, rather that what’s not going to make people mad,” said committee member and economics professor Joe Sicilian.

Other unresolved issues include:

• Whether to expand access to tickets by limiting some or all retirees’ tickets to eight or four games a year.
• Whether to convert some or all of the 16-game tickets to eight- or four-game packages.
• Questions surrounding the fairness of limiting married couples to two tickets when co-habitating couples could, in theory, have access to four tickets.

Plans call for the Faculty Executive Committee — known on campus as FacEx — presenting the athletic corporation’s seating-arrangement offer to the full University Council on Thursday.

Davis said discussion Thursday would be limited to the seating arrangement. The allocation formula, he said, would be presented at the council’s Dec. 4 meeting.

Plans also are to poll faculty and staff on their preferences.\