Housing and Dining Services has spent half a million dollars repairing elevators on campus.

The elevators have all been redone within the past seven years, said Mark Hudson, director of Housing and Dining.

Despite the repairs, students still say that the elevators in residence halls are unreliable.

“Recently, I haven’t heard any problems, but in the past we have had a lot of issues,” said Brittany Buchanan, a junior elementary education major who lives in Andrews Hall. “We had a lot of problems at the beginning of the semester and one broke down for about a month.”

Buchanan said that the other elevator in Andrews Hall was having problems at the beginning of the semester as well.

Stevenson and Lawson halls have also reported elevator problems.

“We haven’t had many problems recently, but every couple weeks throughout the semester there will be a problem with them,” said Larissa Cascio, senior elementary education major living in Stevenson.

Cascio said that usually only one elevator breaks down at a time and the elevator is out of order for a few days at a time at the very most.

Despite the problems, Eastern’s elevators are actually better than a lot of schools.

“I think that what our elevator repairman tells us is that we have better elevators than most other schools, the students treat them well and the problems are pretty intermittent,” Hudson said.

Otis Worldwide maintains all the elevators on campus.

“The university does not employ elevator mechanics; Otis does that for us all over campus,” said Mark Shaklee, associate director of Housing and Dining.

Even though there have been problems, a residence hall has never had less than one elevator.

“There was one that had a fairly major repair [in Andrews], but the other one was operational. Not having access to elevators has not happened yet, however,” Hudson said.

Despite the reported problems, Eastern has no plans to upgrade elevators at this time.

“We don’t have a specific plan for any particular elevator at this time; we have updated all elevators in the past,” Shaklee said. “As they need new things, we do new things to them.”

Hudson said whenever mechanical things are involved, there are bound to be problems.

“Well, we’ve had some isolated issues with some machines. Anytime we have mechanical issues, we have problems,” said Hudson. “If there are problems with it, our technical team comes out.”

Heather Holm can be reached at 581-7942 or haholm@eiu.edu.