(Photo courtesy of UMass Lowell) “Students are able to go online and check the availability of washers and dryers in their building using WaveVision.”
Lillie Zate
Connector Contributor
Earlier this week UMass Lowell’s Residence Life announced that laundry services will be included in students’ housing fees beginning fall 2022.
For the last 10 years, UMass Lowell has been locked in a contract with their current vendor to supply laundry services in residence halls, allowing students to pay with quarters or credit cards. However, in more recent years, residents were reporting problems with the laundry machines such as credit card reader malfunctions and dryers being limited to a cold setting.
Amanda Surgens, the director of residence life, said that the department had been wanting to make changes to the laundry services situation for a while, feeling a bit of discontent themselves. After hearing feedback from students, they realized that everyone was unhappy and recognized that an upgrade was needed. However, due to the multi-year contract, the department was unable to make changes until now.
“We have recognized that some students’ financial situations are bleak given the pandemic and we wanted to keep that in mind while we were making these decisions,” said Surgens. “Timing everything with something like this, and we felt like this was the perfect time to make changes.”
One of the biggest problems with the laundry services was the inability to fix or replace machines because of the university’s contract with their current vendor. Upon the expiration of the contract, a separate committee was put together to look for other vendors to supply laundry services. One of their goals was to find alternative payment options for residents to replace the coin or credit card payment method. With their new vendor, the university signed a much shorter contract t0 allow for upgrades if the same problems continue.
Now that laundry services will be included in housing fees by next semester, one concern is that the cost of living on campus will also increase. Housing rates for next semester were proposed and approved back in January before the decision to include laundry was made. Residence Life said they are not exactly sure how things are going to work as the decision was only finalized in the last few weeks.
“The bottom line from all of this is that students will not incur the cost to wash their clothes. That is our goal,” Surgens says.
With the changes to laundry services, residential students can expect new machines in all residence halls, except River-Hawk Village.
“We are all really excited about these changes, and we hope this will make students happy,” Surgens said. “These changes have been a long time coming. The changes will be cost-saving for the students, and we hope that they take advantage of it.”