Residents in South Village and Phase I and II apartments experienced difficulty receiving services from facilities early this semester and this summer, primarily with air conditioning concerns.
Since students have returned to campus, there have been complications with air conditioning related work orders, according to three residents. Sam Avalos, a student living in the GEA apartments on campus said her air conditioner was damaged upon arrival, along with other appliances. Being on the second floor, the apartment was extremely hot with no air conditioning.
“When I moved in, the air conditioning wasn’t working,” Avalos said. “There was no air blowing from the vents. The light was broken and so was the garbage disposal.”
According to the Cal State LA facilities website, emergencies are supposed to be handled within 24 hours after a work order is submitted. Facilities consider a request an emergency when the issue has an effect on health and safety or it continually “disrupts academic, student, or administrative functions.”
Not only are the high temperatures a safety concern but it also has affected the students’ academic functions as some claimed the rooms were too hot to study in.
Issues with air conditioning maintenance started over the summer, as Phase I resident Yordanos Feleke shared. Feleke said the thermostat would get up to 80 degrees in her apartment, leaving her to deal with poor living conditions during the peak of summer.
“We put in a work order… they [facilities fixed it then] left, it worked for five minutes after and it was just back to being broken again,” Feleke said.
Feleke feels that the facilities staff didn’t communicate well and was disappointed with the service she received.
Facilities could not be reached for a statement about the situation, despite multiple emails.
This follows a lack of pay given to facility employees over the summer, according to an anonymous source, who wishes to remain unnamed for fear of retaliation, within facilities. Students were left to deal with the hottest months of the year without access to air conditioning. Though the heat has subsided, and facilities workers are back to work, the department is still recovering from the summer, and students are still experiencing delays as a result. Facilities is also preparing for the upcoming retirement of housing’s Associate Director of Facilities Mark Facio.
The anonymous facilities department staff member spoke on the situation relating to repairs within housing on campus.
“So the problem was that, when facilities staff were asked to go and do repairs over at housing Phase II with various issues like fire alarms or the air conditioning, unfortunately, after we would do the work, we wouldn’t get paid,” they said.
The source said that the department would have to deal with the costs of the repairs internally. As facilities workers are an unionized group, they decided to no longer continue the work until they were paid. The source said that in response, Cal State LA looked for outside contractors who were also too expensive, leaving no one to tend to residents’ issues throughout the summer.
According to the source, the situation has recently improved, allowing facilities workers to resume work. However, they said that facilities are currently short-staffed and are working to get reimbursed for their labor over the summer.
In addition to this, the Housing and Residence Life department is also short-staffed and dealing with the retirement of Facio.
Grey Arias, a housing employee and resident, said Facio officially left early September. According to Facio’s Linked-in, he began at Cal State Fullerton in September. As a resident, Arias said their air conditioner was fixed after three weeks of living on campus.
While working in housing, they’ve received a large amount of complaints regarding air conditioning issues since the fall semester has begun.
The source said they believed that Facio’s retirement and the issues in housing and facilities were correlated.
The University Times reached out to housing and Facio for a comment but did not reach him, despite multiple emails. Cal State LA’s Public Affairs Department has also yet to give a statement regarding the matter despite multiple emails.
Solutions to these concerns are still up in the air as students, residents and staff await for a response from the university.
Editor’s note: For full disclosure, the reporter was a former housing resident and experienced facilities issues herself, though has not reported on them for this story.
