Broken doors… dirty clothes thrown about and left for days… water leaking out onto the floor. It’s not a scene one would associate with a facility meant for cleanliness, but in Sonoma State’s resident villages, the situation really is that sour. For the last three semesters at least, the laundry rooms have always been somewhat rundown, but it’s this semester that the situation has come to a head. Let’s just be frank here: the laundromat rooms on campus stink. Figuratively and literally.

So what’s specifically so bad about the rooms, anyway? Firstly, there’s always something just plain gross left in them: socks and other small clothing items carelessly left behind, pools of dirty water on the floor, or in one case a foul-smelling liquid left in the detergent compartment for God-knows-how-long. For rooms meant for cleaning clothes, the laundry rooms don’t – and never actually have – felt clean.

Now, these issues could be boiled down to carelessness, on the part of people not cleaning up after themselves, but that’s not where the issue

ends. The rooms are not only gross, but half the time it’s hard to find a machine that even functions. They often don’t clean or dry clothes enough, and require using them more than one time. There are more specific cases too, like one machine in Tuscany where the door consistently jams, and students have left notes of its deterioration over time . It’s an extremely common sight to go into the laundry rooms and see a ridiculous amount of the machines have “out of service” magnets on them.

Now to give the university credit, they have recently addressed the issue in an email sent out to campus. They acknowledged the state of the laundry rooms on campus, and are in fact close to hiring a new vendor for servicing the rooms. While this is good news, it’s upsetting how long it’s taken them to even acknowledge the issue; to put it into perspective, I’ve been here for three semesters now, and this is the first time administration has said anything about it at all.

In the email, the campus admits that the rooms haven’t lived up to their “high standards”. But the problem is only being solved after it was allowed to get as bad as it did, and that to me is maddening. With what we pay to live here on campus, we deserve better conditions than what we’ve had to deal with for so long now. I hope that this issue, and their acknowledgement of it, will set a precedent for the future when issues with the dorms come up.