Two residents of the Village Apartments in Stevens Point said Tuesday, Jan. 22, as temperatures stayed below zero all day, that they had been without adequate heat for several days, with temperatures in their apartments having dropped below 50 degrees.
One said his heat hasn’t been working properly for several weeks. Both said it is a wide-spread problem in the apartments.
“A lot of people we’ve talked to have gone to the office,” said Cynthia (not her real name), a University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP) student and resident of Village Apartments since August. “It’s not just us. It’s not just this building.”
A representative from Paramount Properties, which manages the apartments, initially said the heat was functioning normally in the four Village Apartment buildings. “I did speak to my maintenance man,” said Gail Catalano, business manager for Paramount Properties in Madison, in a phone message Wednesday. “As far as the buildings go everything is functioning correctly.”
Catalano called later Wednesday to report that a boiler for one of the buildings was found in need of replacement and that a heating company was actively working on the repair.
Catalano said a work order is written up for each maintenance issue that is reported, but she did need immediately know how many complaints had been made about inadequate heat or how many of those complaints were in the building found to have a defective boiler.
Cynthia said it starting getting cold in her apartment at the end of last week, getting “really bad” by the morning of Sunday, Jan. 19, when outside temperatures plummeted. The temperature gauge on her apartment’s thermostat goes down to 50 degrees and it got so cold she could no longer see the needle.
The rest of this content is only available in our print edition.
Subscribe or locate a newsstand.
