By Jaime Hoerbelt

The Student Government Association passed a resolution Tuesday attempting to solve current issues regarding residence halls without individualized heating and cooling systems.

A number of residence halls-notably the towers and the Netherlands-contain centralized heating and cooling. The temperature of the entire building is controlled in one location. After a certain date or if there is a period of consecutive days below a specified temperature, the air conditioning is turned off and the heat is turned on for the whole building.

“I understand why they do it this way. It’s more efficient, but the past two weeks it’s been tough not having AC,” said Angela Ferris, a freshman resident of the Netherlands. “It’s really hot for sleeping and even getting work done, even more so because we have to leave our doors closed, and the air doesn’t circulate. I think they need to judge a better date at which to switch,” she added.

Rules Committee Chair Jared Berry proposed this legislation to look into personalizing the heating and cooling systems or at least changing the way the temperature is regulated to make it more flexible and sensitive to student opinions and needs.

“Being [a resident assistant], I’ve received several complaints. They want to know if there’s a way to turn the heat off, because once it went below fifty degrees the air conditioning went off,” Berry said. “Basically, there were a couple of days after that where the temperature went up to as much as 73 degrees, and residents were complaining. Because even when they opened the windows it was still pretty warm in the rooms, and they had no way to control the temperature.”

Problems with inappropriate room temperatures can occur relatively often because it is uncertain who actually has the ability to override the temperature system. “RAs have no control,” Berry said. “We were told at a staff meeting that there’s no control over it, and we just have to try and hope for the best that it gets cool soon.”

Many senators were concerned with how these proposed changes would affect tuition. Some senators countered that there is currently no price increase between rooms that have personalized heating and cooling and rooms without, so any alterations should not affect room and board prices. There was no opposition to the resolution, and it passed unanimously.

An individual HVAC unit in a residence hall room. The towers and the Netherlands complex do not have individually controllable HVAC units in each room. (Jaime Hoerbelt)