Note: Louisiana legislators will decide what to do with a significant surplus of cash available to the state in the next legislative session in March. Ahead of the session, The Reveille is dedicating a string of stories looking at LSU’s infrastructure. This is the third story in the ongoing series.

During his first semester living in Herget Hall, Chris Morgan had to contend with more than just other freshmen. Those who lived on the first floor spent their first semester stepping over geckos. 

“We got a bunch of geckos, a bunch,” Morgan, a jazz studies major, said. “I was walking out of my door to go to class and I almost stepped on a baby gecko. And that’s just the first time.”

After checking with other Herget residents to see if someone was playing an elaborate prank, Morgan said that it was a consistent problem, one not isolated to the first floor. 

Issues like gecko infestations, unreliable building services and the dirty floors have led many residents, current and former, to refer to the dorm as “Dirty Herg” and “Herghetto.” 

Built in 1964, the dorm is located off South Campus Drive near University Lake.

One of the most commonly cited problems with the building is its elevators and their frequent outages, Morgan and another resident, Armani Stamps, said. 

“I live on the sixth floor, so when it’s out, I have to take six flights of stairs up and down,” Stamps, a business maintenance student, said. 

The problem, Stamps and Morgan explained, is that maintenance on the elevators takes days, even weeks, to get them operational again. There was a period in October where the elevator was out of service for two weeks, Morgan explained. 

Another issue residents have is the inconsistent temperature control within the building. On the third floor, the air conditioning is out across the floor, Morgan said. This is not isolated to the third floor.

“The temperatures are either extremely warm or extremely cold on the sixth floor,” Elaina Bachmann, a vocal music education freshman, said. 

Temperature control issues extend to the bathrooms as well, where Morgan said that the showers “don’t go any lower than boiling” on the third floor. There’s no cold or room temperature water, she said.  

In bathrooms, there is hope that they are sanitary environments, however, Stamps stated that the bathrooms aren’t very clean.

Other issues include torn, uncomfortable furniture in common areas, broken washers and dryers throughout the semester, and a basement that is “really gross,” Morgan said.

Peter Trentacoste, the executive director of Residential Life, says it is important for students to put in work orders for ongoing issues because it is the best way for staff to quickly resolve them.

Trentacoste said he was unaware of the gecko problem, but believes it might be due to Herget’s close proximity to the campus lake and that they are not a species that can typically be sprayed or pretreated for. He says the Residential Life staff will look into it and do their best to exclude geckos from floors and rooms as notified.

In regard to elevator maintenance sometimes taking weeks, Trentacoste says Res-Life has an elevator service contract that quickly responds to outages, but sometimes longer outages may occur if a new part needs to be ordered. Their expectation is not to be out for a week.

Trentacoste also said Res-Life does not receive a lot of complaints about water being too hot but encourages students to put in work orders to ensure the issue can be resolved or examined.

“Unless we have a work order, we may not actually know there’s a problem with it [water temperature],” Trentacoste said. “So we’d rather have 20 students all at once telling us its a problem and that quickly gets attention versus the assumption of, ‘I’m pretty sure somebody has to know this,’ when in reality we may not.”

Trentacoste also noted that unlike other entities on campus, Res-Life is funded by student rent, not the university.

“This is not a campus-funded thing in that we don’t get money from tuition and then that somehow gets filtered to us,” Trentacoste said. “All of our renovations and improvements are funded through the collection of student rent and student housing payment.”

Herget’s reputation has long been established as less than satisfactory. As reported by the Reveille in 2011, it ranked as the No.12 worst dorm in America. 

Since then, it was announced in 2018 that the dorm would be demolished to make way for other, newer dorms. Along with other dorms scheduled for demolition like Acadian and Kirby Smith, it is set for demolition in 2023.

While demolition may have been the plan in 2018, Trentacoste says Herget could possibly be around for another 10 years due to factors like COVID-19, enrollment needs, and low cost housing options for students.

“The good news is Herget and Miller are not falling into the earth,” Trentacoste said. “Quite the opposite. They are quality, well-built facilities.”

Trentacoste said Herget hasn’t been on a major renovation list in a while, but over 75% of LSU’s residence halls have been renovated in the past 20 years. They will still continue to evaluate the building and determine their needs while making improvements.

Trentacoste says although updating bathrooms, painting the facility, and replacing furniture will not be a complete renovation, it will feel that way for many students because these facilities will be more reliable and have better finishes than they started with.

“There’s been a lot of great work that’s been done here within LSU Residential Life, but we’re not done,” Trentacoste said. “My hope is that students that have kids someday come back to campus and are blown away by the condition and care that’s been taken by that point.”

Having these older dorms around campus provide a few benefits, such as cheaper options for students that may not be able to afford the cost of newer dorms and the opportunity to live in the same buildings parents and grandparents lived in, Trentacoste said.

Catherine David, associate director of communications and development for Residential Life, says living in these buildings can become family tradition.

“Buildings like Miller and Herget, typically Miller, they’re like legacy buildings,” David said. “It’s become a tradition for families to live there.”

While some students like Stamps were placed in Herget after wanting to live in a newer dorm like Azalea, others like Morgan and Bachmann chose Herget as their new home, despite its historical reputation.

“I heard bad things about Herget before coming to LSU, but I actually kind of like the rustic appeal of it. I went to a boarding school with run down dorms, so it reminds me of that,” Bachmann said. “There’s kind of a romantic appeal to it being really lame.” 

Even the nostalgic appeal of a 1960s-era dorm can’t bring Bachmann to recommend future students stay in Herget, even if it is a cheaper option. 

Despite feeling the university “should be able to afford a clean space” with the amount the dorms cost to live in, Morgan wouldn’t change where he lives on campus, citing a solidarity with his fellow residents. 

He would, however, not recommend living in Herget until the university does something to improve conditions. 

“Literally every night, there’s anywhere from five, 10, 15 people hanging out in the lobby. We are all kind of bonding over our struggles,” Morgan said. “Sometimes the problems make it really fun, but still not ideal.”