By Kimberly DonahueSpecial to the chronicle
Student complaints over outstanding maintenance requests for issues like broken doors and laundry machines are mounting this year. Reportedly, five to 15 orders are put in a day, and the maintenance staff says they attempt to address the requests in order of necessity without disrupting students’ daily lives.
Long outstanding maintenance requests can pose security problems. The door to the Delft House in the Netherlands complex, for example, was recently broken for about a week. The door, therefore, was left open with a chair in order for residents to access their dorms, putting their safety at risk. This is typically considered an emergency situation, according to the work request form on the MyHofstra Portal.
When one of these problems arises, students are advised to submit a maintenance request on their MyHofstra Portal.
Repair requests like power outages and ceiling leaks are both qualified as emergencies, but according to Richard Leddy, director of design, construction and engineering at Hofstra, the ceiling repair is considerably lower on the list of things to do.
“Normally, if there’s an emergency such as somebody’s power is out in their room, that is usually immediately responded to,” Leddy said. “Or if air conditioning or heat wasn’t working, those are particularly responded to within a matter of an hour or two. Whereas, if it was a leak and the leak is on the top of a 14-story tower, and it could be outside on a window, they may have to bring somebody in from the outside with a scaffold, perhaps to go outside the building and find the source of the leak or repair it.”
The repair requests appear to get muddled in bureaucratic levels of the administration. For example, the broken door in Delft House would likely have to be mitigated by Card Services, according to Dom Lavin, director of campus operations. “They would have to go and find out if the card reader was working or broken or if they needed a new one,” he said.
“So you can understand there’s a little more complexity on something like that that has to go through a step-by-step [process] to determine what part or what piece has to be repaired by who,” Lavin said. “So that’s why that process may take a little bit longer because it’s not always clear and cut which department has to actually respond to that work order.”
Residence Life within Student Affairs determines which department handles the request submissions based on criterion like necessity, Lavin said.
“[In Delft’s case] it could’ve been a hardware issue and they had to order a piece that was damaged … We’d have to order that specific work order to give a reason why it took as long as it did, if it did within what the expectations were,” Lavin said.
There are maintenance issues occurring all over campus, and as the requests build up, the impatience in students increases.
“I feel like since the Netherlands is a complex with multiple houses, every house should have equal opportunity for every single advantage it should have,” Bradley Clarke, a Groningen House resident said, in reference to not having a television in the lounge. “Especially being the STUDIO House, we have a sign that says ‘TV, film’, right on our front door before we go in so I think if we’re involved in the media, we should at least have television access.”
The television in the Groningen House has since been fixed.
According to Michael Perlmutter, assistant director of Residential Operations, there are an average of five to 15 work requests made a day. “If someone calls our emergency number … that problem is dispatched out immediately. But if it’s something like a new chair, or a bed needs to be raised, then it takes about a day to a week depending on whatever we have going on,” Perlmutter said.
In relation to the high influx of laundry machine-related requests, Perlmutter explained that Hofstra uses an outside vendor named Hercules to fix the laundry machine equipment. Hofstra’s contract with the vendor requires the company to respond within 24 hours to fix the situation, according to Perlmutter.
“Anytime a student puts in a work order that is a laundry machine broken or a dryer broken, I call those in right away and on average we’ll get maybe five [requests] a week,” Perlmutter said.
It takes an influx of complaints to quicken Hercules’s efficiency. “That’s when we’ll notify them right away saying ‘We’re getting two complaints, three complaints, four complaints’ and that usually speeds up the process,” Perlmutter said.
“I feel like we’re not being heard and they just don’t care about our needs,” Netherlands Complex resident Marcia Aracena said. “They don’t care about the conditions we’re living in. Everyone’s fighting for the washer, it’s like survival of the fittest.”
Perlmutter explained that in residence halls like the towers, where 255 or more students reside, there could be 15 to 20 work requests submitted in an overnight period for the same issue. In this situation, Perlmutter will tell Hercules, “Look, there’s three machines that are offline, this is a building that has six machines for 255 people, you need to put a priority on it.”
Not all students, however, see many issues with maintenance requests. Brenna Morgan, a resident of Constitution Hall said, “The only big problem is that we don’t have hand dryers or paper towel dispensers in the bathrooms.”
Residence Life is working with Hercules to input a wireless reporting system that would send alerts directly to the company from the broken machines. Perlmutter also said the laundry app is under construction to improve accuracy.
“What we’re working with in these very, very early stages is that we’re working with our vendor to create a better tracking system … [that] improves their response time, and in addition, gives a bit more customer service,” Perlmutter said.