Out of order: Monthslong elevator outage frustrates Waterbury renters
July 10, 2026 | By Otis Roessler | Community News Service 
Douglas Perry, at his apartment in Waterbury Center, says he feels limited in his daily activities without the building's elevator working. Photo by Gordon Miller
On Sunday, February 1, Bronté Campos and her infant son returned from church to their apartment in the Green Mountain Seminary complex on Hollow Road. As a third-floor resident with a young child in a carrier, Campos elected to take the elevator.
But when the elevator stopped on Campos’ floor, the door wouldn’t open.
She called her neighbor, Victoria Maradiaga Ramos, who dialed 911. After 40 minutes, first responders had pried them out of the elevator using crowbars.
“I felt really bad for her,” Ramos said. “She started panicking, and her son was in there.”
Unfortunately for Campos, Ramos and other residents, this was only the beginning.
In the more than five months since Campos’ incident, the elevator has still not been fixed. The situation has proven to be a major roadblock for residents, some of whom are elderly or disabled. Property managers at Downstreet Housing & Community Development in Barre, which owns and runs the apartments, blame the delay on the elevator company, which has provided ever-shifting deadlines for when the equipment might be fixed.
Angie Harbin, Downstreet’s executive director, said her organization has done all it can do. “I’m sure residents are really upset. We are really upset,” she said.
In the meantime, residents’ patience is running short.
“I can understand maybe two weeks, but (five) months? That’s a little ridiculous,” said Douglas Perry, an 84-year old-veteran who lives on the third floor.
Perry says he’s feeling limited by the lack of a working elevator, but he’s managing to come and go from his apartment. He carefully goes down the building’s back stairs, but he said family members are helping him out when it comes to doing errands like grocery runs where he needs to carry things back to his unit.
Thirty-nine people live in the 16 units at the Seminary Apartments on Hollow Road in Waterbury Center. Photo by Anna Gilmore
The three-story Seminary building was built in 1869 as a school for Free Will Baptists, a subgroup of the Baptist church. Around the turn of the 20th century, it was transferred to the town and run as a school into the 1960s. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, this building has also hosted a childcare center, public library branch and an art center, which continues today.
A chair blocks a non-working ground-floor elevator inside Seminary Apartments. Photo by Anna Gilmore
In 2001, Downstreet converted much of the building into apartments, which it rents at subsidized and flat rates. Downstreet operates three other apartment complexes in downtown Waterbury, including senior apartments in the Stimson and Graves building on Stowe Street and the recently opened Marsh House apartments on South Main.
Harbin said the 16 units in the Seminary Apartments today house 39 people. But at least one resident has recently moved out due to the elevator outage, according to Neil Smith, Downstreet’s director of property management.
With a growing child, Campos buys a lot of groceries and does a lot of laundry, and the washers and dryers are on the first floor. A functioning elevator is important for Campos’ life, she said.
“It’s been a huge issue, especially having him,” she said, gesturing to her son. “He’s 17 pounds.”
Perry, the veteran, said he’s staying at home more often because the prospect of climbing the stairs back to his apartment is so daunting. Routine tasks like doing laundry or buying groceries have now become a tiring affair, and Perry has been forced to enlist his 77-year-old sister for help, he said.
With a recent cancer diagnosis, Perry will need to attend more doctor’s appointments. He hopes the elevator is fixed when that time comes.
Perry said he recently filed a complaint with the Vermont Human Rights Commission over the matter. The commission has not yet responded to a request for details about the status of Perry’s complaint.
The broken elevator has also created a problem for first responders who need to transport people from the building to an ambulance. Waterbury Ambulance Service Chief Zachary Rounds said EMTs have had to manually move patients down the stairwell.
“It often requires additional manpower and ultimately delays transport to the hospital,” Rounds said.
Other elevator outages
A similar scenario played out at a Montpelier apartment building last fall when an elevator failure left some elderly residents stranded for months, VTDigger reported at the time. The contractor, Otis Elevator Company, blamed the lengthy delays on backordered parts. The issue has since been fixed, a representative from the Montpelier Housing Authority, which operates the building, told the Roundabout on Monday.
Likewise, the elevator in Montpelier’s City Hall, damaged by flooding in July 2023, only in early June was restored and put back into service. In the two years and 11 months it was out of order, the building was not accessible to those unable to use the stairs, including audience members for Lost Nation Theater productions in the building’s second-floor theater.
Intermittent elevator stoppages have also plagued Decker Towers, an 11-story low-income complex in Burlington, WCAX reported in March. The building owner, Burlington Housing Authority, hired Otis Elevator to fix the issue, which required bringing in a technician from California, according to Steven Murray, the housing authority’s executive director. The repairs took three months and $40,000 to address, Murray said.
The same company is now working with Downstreet. According to Otis, the age of the Seminary Apartments elevator has created technical difficulties in the repair process. Otis has had to contact the original manufacturer, ThyssenKrupp, which has sent technicians to the building. The arrangement has caused numerous delays.
Landon Wheeler is the deputy director of the Vermont Division of Fire Safety. He said these issues depend on the age and make of the elevator. While the state works with housing managers to make a “plan of compliance” to ensure a timely repair, issues in the repair process are settled between the building owners and the elevator company, Wheeler explained.
State inspectors who do regular elevator inspections also inspect after an elevator is repaired, he said. So in this case, Downstreet is responsible for posting signage about the elevator status and arranging for a certified mechanic to fix it.
With the elevator out of order, tenants need to use interior stairs such as this front staircase to reach upper floors at the three-story Seminary Apartments building in Waterbury Center. Photo by Anna Gilmore
Growing frustration
Emails obtained by the Waterbury Roundabout show Downstreet’s growing frustration with the situation.
On June 3, Otis employee Hannah Miele told Downstreet that a planned repair had been delayed “once again.”
“My sincerest apologies for this change,” she wrote in an email. “It is my understanding that there will be no more delays from the vendor.”
Smith, the property management director, responded later that day. “It seems that every update we receive is another delayed service appointment, or the tech has the wrong laptop, or the laptop is right but the software is wrong, or some combination of that, etc. etc.,” he wrote. “There have been months of messages like this and it seems as though Otis simply cannot meet the needs for a timely repair within reason.”
By June 29, little had changed. Garrick Casavant, Otis’ Vermont territory manager, emailed Downstreet with another murky timeline, writing, “the plan is to have their adjustor onsite mid to end next week to move forward here.”
Jenny Hyslop, Downstreet’s senior director of housing operations, responded with a pointed email.
“That timeline is not one that is acceptable in the midst of a heat wave with tenants who have gone without an elevator for six months,” she wrote. “I would like to speak with an accountable member of the leadership team at Otis today.”
But Otis has still not provided a concrete timeline for fixing the elevator. Otis officials declined an interview request with the Roundabout, instead providing a statement on July 2 acknowledging the inconvenience caused by the delay.
“We are working closely with the elevator’s original manufacturer to troubleshoot issues primarily related to the elevator’s software and the age of the unit, and will return the elevator back into service as quickly as possible,” the statement says. “There is nothing more important to Otis than the safety of our customers, employees and the riding public.”
Residents so far have mixed opinions on whether their landlord should be doing more to fix the problem. Perry suggested that the elevator company is likely to blame.
Ramos, however, is less forgiving. “You don’t get apologies or nothing, just excuses,” she said. “It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
Community News Service is a University of Vermont journalism internship program reporting for Vermont news organizations, including Waterbury Roundabout.