Sally Harper talks about problems she is having with the heat in her apartment at Boynton Terrace.Public housing residents say being in a room where an outside party regulates the heat is like sitting behind the steering wheel while someone else drives the car.
“This is not like it used to be,” said 75-year-old Sally Harper, who has lived in her Boynton Terrace apartment for more than a decade. “We used to have heat and didn’t have to worry about nobody turning things down. Now we do.”
Harper is among dozens of Boynton Terrace seniors who have received new thermostats intended to prevent public housing residents from turning their heat higher than 75 degrees. Now, as the city experiences some of its coldest weather in years, the Chattanooga Housing Authority is temporarily supplying space heaters after receiving complaints that some apartments aren’t warm enough.
CHA Executive Director Betsy McCright and Mike Sabin, the agency’s director of low-income public housing, did not return calls seeking comment Thursday.
But CHA has said it is installing regulators that will prevent public housing residents from setting thermostats higher than 75 degrees in the winter and lower than 70 in the summer. The program is expected to help save CHA $100,000 a year and is being carried out under the terms of an energy performance contract with Honeywell. By spring the thermostats will be in nine of the housing authority’s 16 public housing sites.