By BOB SHRALUKA
WZBD.com
Decatur City Council recently approved an additional appropriation of $149,000 to pay off the chiller which is part of the new HVAC (heat, ventilation, air conditioning) system installed at the MERIT Center.
All systems are now in place as the work is nearly complete, Mayor Rickord and Clerk-Treasurer Kevin Hackman said.
Late last year, the city approved a contract with the Dilling Group, headquartered in Logansport, to have installed, for the sum of $455,000, new boilers, controls and a pump along with a chiller, at the former Northwest School building on Dayton Ave.
The costs are covered by a state READI grant of $290,000 plus the $200,000 Adams County has paid the city for a small hunk of land on the northeast corner of the lot on which the MERIT Center is situated.
The .7 of an acre of land bought by the county will become the site of a garage to be built by the county to house the transportation service’s vehicles.
Since a chiller could not be obtained for a lengthy period of time, council signed a contract for one last year to avoid a price increase coming this year, but withheld payment until now.
City Operations Manager Jeremy Gilbert told council that the contractor “has done a wonderful job out there” and he had high praise for project manager John Gilbert of Decatur.
“He has been very responsive,” Jeremy Gilbert (no relation of John’s) said.
The building, purchased by the city several years ago from North Adams Schools for $1, has 55,000 square feet and much of it is being used by various organizations, including the Adams County Transit system.
The HVAC system, however, was taking its last breaths and something had to be done, city officials said.
Information on the Internet says a chiller is a giant refrigerator that uses either an absorption cycle or vapor compression to do its magic. It circulates a refrigerant through a closed system where it picks up heat from the building interior and then ejects that unwanted warmth outside, leaving nothing but cold comfort behind.
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