The Office of Residential Life began accepting applications from students Tuesday evening to participate in an online lottery for free vouchers for local summer storage. Over 600 vouchers, worth $60 each, will be available through the lottery to redeem with East Providence-based Space Station Self-Storage.
The $60 storage voucher offered through the lottery on the ResLife Web site can cover the cost of one of three packages offered by Space Station, Brown Student Agencies President Idan Naor '08 wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. One of the packages includes two small book boxes and one large box, another includes one large box and one medium box and a third offers two medium boxes and one large box. All packages include a roll of packing tape.
The company's same "discounted voucher rates" will also be offered to Brown students who did not receive a voucher, Naor said. In addition to the packages, the vouchers can also be put towards the cost of other storage options with Space Station, he added.
Students can drop off boxes at several campus locations May 10-19, said Space Station General Manager John Erikson. Over a three-day period in early September, Space Station will "stagger the deliveries" of boxes to students on campus, so they will be able to select a time frame when they would like to pick up their belongings, Erikson said.
Students who are offered vouchers through the lottery will be notified by 5 p.m. on Friday and have until next Tuesday to confirm. If they do not respond by the deadline, they will forfeit the voucher and it will be reassigned to a student on the waitlist.
Students transferring their vouchers to friends caused problems last year, Naor said. "This year we made a very big point of nontransferable vouchers," he said. If students wish to pass their voucher along to a friend, they will be given "a fairly narrow window of time" to do so, "probably over the weekend," said Associate Director of Housing and Residential Life Thomas Forsberg.
Forsberg said around 1,100 applicants applied for about 600 vouchers last year, and almost all of the vouchers were used. Students can choose to store their belongings with any company with services in the area, but the vouchers will only be good for storage with Space Station.
After ending on-campus storage in the summer of 2004, the University used the storage company Smart Movers - now part of Mad Packers - for the summers of 2005 and 2006. Though no major problems occurred the first year the University worked with the company, last fall many students complained of receiving their items days or even weeks after their return to campus. Many also expressed frustration over the company's unresponsiveness to their attempts at contact.
"I'm really confident things will go much better" with storage this summer, said Sara Gentile '09, admissions and student services chair of the Undergraduate Council of Students. Gentile served on a committee of students and administrators that selected the new company.
Gentile cited customer service as one of the key priorities in selecting the new company. Last year, boxes often went missing or were not at the correct location when students returned to pick up their items in the fall, Forsberg said. Those problems, he said, were caused by a glitch in Smart Movers' new computer system.
"Students would call and e-mail and never get a response" about their belongings, Gentile added.
Larry Byron, the company's owner, told The Herald last September that the computer system glitches and students' failure to reserve a pick-up time by the deadline contributed to delays in returning boxes.
Erikson said Space Station would "be available 24/7 during the crucial periods," rolling calls to its offices over to staff members' cell phones to respond quickly to requests.
Business Services Manager Diane Chouinard, who also served on the search committee, said the company's location "just a few miles from campus" was a major attraction - if notified within approximately 24 hours, Space Station promises to return students' items to campus, she said.
Forsberg said endorsing an off-campus company to provide summer storage for students is "certainly superior" to providing on-campus storage to students. On-campus storage was "extremely difficult to manage," with problems arising such as water damage to uninsured items, he said.
Even students "squatting" in their current rooms for the upcoming year cannot keep items in their rooms over the summer, Forsberg said, since the University uses many rooms over the summer for such occasions as commencement and summer programs.
Sarah Goldstein '09 remembered that "it took like a month to get my roommate's fridge," after using Smart Movers last year because "they couldn't locate it." But she said she would still feel comfortable using storage handled by the University if she wasn't driving her belongings to her home in Maryland instead.
