Buildings and Facilities Task Force

Monday, March 2, 2026 - 9:00 am

Chris Clark - Chairman

Chairman Clark called this task force to order at 9:00 am with the following in attendance: Matt Brassard, Chris Clark, Clayton Menser, Tim Pierce, Richard Preston, Cathy Reusser, Matt Stanley, Davina Thurston (9:18), Meg Wood, Mike Mascarenas and Jim Dougan.

Also present: Dina Garvey, Andrew Stanley, Nathaniel Jones, Hugh Harwood, Todd Hodgson, Nancy Page, and Elizabeth Lee.

CLARK: Well, let’s start this meeting. Jim, what have you got for us?

DOUGAN: We’ll start with Andrew.

STANLEY, ANDREW: Alright, so I am just going to buzz through a few of the projects that I have been covering and then I am going to hand it over to Hugh and Nate and they’re going to cover some of the work that they have been doing at the Public Safety Building.

Ag and Youth Building; Contractors are currently finishing up their interior punch list. They’re just about done, should be walking out this week from the interior. Once weather permits, they’re going to step outside and finish up their exterior punch list. They still got a few things that they’ve got to finish up outside. Hopefully, I mean they all plan on being out of there by the end of April, regardless of weather.

MASCARENAS: That’s good

STANLEY, ANDREW: CCE and Soil and Water plan on moving in sometime around the 1^st-2^nd week in April.

LEE: Yeah, I think it’s better for us to wait until everything gets done. We are kind of strapped people-wise; everybody is at mass capacity; it’s Ag Literature Week in March. We’re just going to wait, and everyone can breathe, there’s a little more move. I know we’re getting a lot of requests for people to use the conference room that are asking us and I am just going to wait. It will be fine, I don’t think it will impact, it will just allow us to do better work, better job, so as long as nobody has any problems with that. We do plan to close for a week, because it’s just a lot, it’s a lot and we’ll be closed, right now, it looks like the week of the 13^th, I think is that Monday, April 13^th.

DOUGAN: Yup

LEE: And we’ll let all the public know and if anyone has any concerns or needs any services, we’ll try and work around that and that’s the best way to approach it.

DOUGAN: Yeah, and Soil and Water has told us the same thing, during the month of April, it sounds like.

LEE: The only thing that I would ask, if you do get a certificate of occupancy and we do have keys, we can do small things. I mean I drive by there almost every day, so I can be taking small things if that’s okay but it won’t actually move. Laurie’s working with Hugh to make sure the, the main driver for the move on our end is the internet, because most of the staff can’t do their work without it.

DOUGAN: Okay

LEE: So, we’ll just stay in touch on that one. But if there are keys, I can start doing small things.

DOUGAN: Yeah, we can start issuing those now, there’s no reason we can’t, and we agreed to provide one of our small, enclosed trailers and one of our Buildings and Grounds guys to help you move some of the stuff.

LEE: Thank you

STANLEY, ANDREW: Okay, former Probation Building remodel; handicapped walkway, handrails have been installed. So, that portion of the project is complete. Buildings and Grounds have finished framing and the rough wiring. The sheetrock is about 75% complete. We expect JFP to be on site to do the seaming and taping in the next couple of weeks, following the completion of that, Buildings and Grounds will prime and paint the walls and prep the area for JFP to install the acoustical drop ceiling. All the materials for the flooring have been delivered. D&D will be onsite to install once the area is ready. We’re targeting sometime in mid-April. Once weather permits, JFP will begin the work on the concrete foundation and slab in the rear of the building and at the end of this month, H&T is scheduled to provide us with the drawings for that parking area and the drainage.

Frontier Town: a resolution was passed to accept Aubertine and Currier’s proposal for $105,000.00 for design. We are currently in the process of executing that contract. So, once that’s fully executed, they will begin design.

DOUGAN: Yeah, those three that, bigger things that we’ve been talking about all the time. We tried to designate most of today’s meeting for Tood, Hugh, Nate to talk about the Public Safety Building unless anybody has any questions on those three, we’ll let you guys jump into that.

HODGSON: I guess I will just jump in to talk about the electrical side of the Public Safety Building. Some of you have been in presentations on the electrical system for the Public Safety Building, but I would just like to review for those that haven’t. This building is unlike any other building that Essex County owns, in fact it’s unlike any other building in Essex County other than I will say Saranac Lake Hospital, which is don’t in Essex County. Any other health care facility that’s even in Essex County is not actually the same kind PFA 110 Level 2 institutional group I3 status that the Public Safety Building is required, because of the 911 dispatch center and because of the Jail. So, for security reasons and so forth, there’s a much higher standard for both the electrical systems and the HVAC systems of this facility.

As a background, the transfer switch was installed in 2007. It was designed to be a closed transition scheme, which means that at the same time that the transfer switch or the relays are closed to the utility, it’s also closed to the generator, making a circuit so that there’s no hiccup in the transition between those two. That’s really difficult up here in the North Country, because of the quality issues that exist. So, what was designed from the beginning did not function as designed, because of the power quality that exists up here in the North Country and it was also installed with a used, not new, NYSEG Wye-Wye Transformer. So, not only is the power quality not very good up here, we also get used equipment to run this facility. That resulted in frequent power problems. Transfer switch, not transitioning correctly, prolonged power outages, the result of that has been that Emergency Services actually purchased and installed their own transfer switch and generator to run the EOC, because they actually were out of power that much that it drained the UPS that runs that facility, so they installed their own as the redundant source, but it does power everything. So, certain portions of the building were still in the dark. The other thing that it does, which is really uncomfortable, is it left the jail in the dark. So, those corrections officers that are in the facility are like literally in the dark. Standard operating procedure was to run around with light towers and have the staged throughout the jail to provide light during those outages and the funny thing is, is that the power would be out even though there was perfectly good generator there and a perfectly good utility there, but because this switch wouldn’t switch correctly.

So, a little bit of the switch gear history; diving in a little bit deeper. There were some coordination studies that were done in 2014, like I said, that backup generator was installed in 2014. The original designer of the switch was hired back on to try and fix some of the problems, to log some of those issues, none of those were successful in actually fully fixing the root problem and because of some of the issues with the transformer, in 2019-2020 that transformer was replaced with a new transformer, actually another used transformer.

JONES: It was a service worn transformer from NYSEG.

HODGSON: But a Delta/Wye to try and eliminate some of the problems that were coming from the grid. It resolved some issues, but we think that was more of a coincidence because of the fact that it was roughly that time period that the quarry down the road stopped operation. So, there was less distortion on the grid.

In 2020 those power issues still persisted, and we began some of the process of planning for some of the improvements at the Public Safety Building.

In 2024 we issued an RFP, that came in, we had no budget I think, and we tried to make something work there and the cost of the engineering alone, just for them to study the problem came in at $129,000, roughly speaking, we didn’t award that.

In 2025, we basically, we started in 2024, but really made a concerted effort in 2025, Jim allocating some of our budgeted funds to begin to do some inhouse work on this particular problem.

DOUGAN: Just introduce yourself, so there are some new supervisors that may not know.

JONES: So, I am Nate Jones and I am one of the assistant project managers that work under Jim and Todd in the engineering department. So, what we did here is this is kind of inhouse findings, so Jim, through the help of the Board, were able to procure us a meter that got us to be able to study the power issues of the building. So, by being able to have that, we have been able to leave it on the building and get long term data, and this is kind of where you’re seeing some of our findings. So, this is what a good source should look like. This is just what it should look like, and this is what the building looked like when we measured it for over three months. This is pretty normal to see a graph like this, versus this is what we’re expecting.

HODGSON: Yeah, that is due to harmonics.

JONES: Yup

HODGSON: It’s the soundwave, if you’re familiar with electricity, 60 cycles per second but was totally desirable.

JONES: Yup and a lot of this is just noise and again that study that we were going to have the engineer do was going to look at noise from NYSEG’s end and not internal noise. So, what we did is decide to look internal to Essex County’s building to see where we can find the problem. So, in that investigation we found that, so the jail and the Public Safety Building both have their individual battery backups that protect the computer for Black Creek which is their security system for the Jail and the Dispatch Center battery backup and both of those are nearly end of life, but both of those combined added noise to the system that created more issues than resolved and we are still monitoring the EOC backup because it’s acting up still.

The problem with the PLC or the brain of the switch gear was that it didn’t like that noise. It got confused and just like a piece of electronic hardware, decided to not work correctly. So, in working with Todd, inhouse and some investigations, we decided to look into how can we make this simpler, right? Can we simplify this process so it’s not so convoluted and also bring down the cost of annual maintenance and actually in turn maybe get our electric bill down a little bit if we could.

HODGSON: Before we go to the next slide though, just in red there, the estimated cost for replacing that switch gear was roughly $750,000.00, that’s what we had kind of allocated.

JONES: That’s what we budgeted.

DOUGAN: No, that’s what you started to tell me to start planning for.

JONES: Yes

So, this is the work that we have completed so far, to date. We went out to an engineering firm called Jay Stone who is a local engineer in the area and they have done work for other local municipalities including ORDA and we came up with a scope of work that we wanted them to do, which was to look at just replacing the brains of this operations to simplify this, so that when the power hits a certain point it’s transfers and when the power goes back to normal, it goes back, keep it simple. Based on doing that, Jay Stone came back with a recommendation of an option that’s estimated to be $40,000.00 and what they involved was literally removing the brains and putting in basic relays that are utility grade that NYSEG or National Grid uses, and they got programmed and tested. Again, as part of this test, we decided to also do in-house testing. So, when it got installed the vendor, had their engineering tech on site and we went through for three days straight and fine tuned the parameters to make sure that when the power does go out this is switch and to prove that this would work, we called NYSEG up and they were polite enough to come by and pull the fuse at the pole and simulate a brown out or a single phase event where only one of the three lights go away and we made sure that the switch transferred seamlessly and we actually got reports from our head of maintenance over there, Jed, that over the last big snowstorm, when they had a voltage problem, the building transferred seamlessly over to generator, it sat there for about 3-4 hours to generator and once the voltage got back up to where it needed to be, it switched back and the head of maintenance was able to keep plowing and taking care of other things and not having to worry about the building being in the dark. So, the simplification actually did end up working.

HODGSON: I also want to point out that we installed a transient voltage surge suppressor to try and get a handle on some of the harmonic distortion that was happening at the building. Because we can’t really change what is happening on the grid, you know we can investigate and find a bunch of problems, but if you have ever dealt with National Grid or NYSEG, getting them to correct any problems is pretty feudal, so we didn’t want to stay in that state, so we installed our own surge suppression and so that, those two items there, with the work being completed inhouse, if you look over at that graph, it’s not really a perfect pie graph, but it just demonstrates the cost savings that we pulled off on this year in 2025, where we had roughly $750,000 for a switch to replace, we replaced that with a, just replacing the brains of the operations and we ended up spending somewhere around, we had a proposal for the engineering only to look at the harmonic issues of $129,000.00. We spent $87,000.00 this year and took care of both of those by having that equipment in house, by doing some of that work ourselves.

JONES: So, for next steps in the process, the biggest thing that we have to deal with is the maintenance of the generator at the building. That generator is a continuous duty rated generator at 1.25 megawatts or 1,250 Kw. It’s a big generator, it’s a diesel generator, it needs annual maintenance and right now it’s under a contract with a vendor who only does a portion of what’s required by CAT to keep that thing up to par for emergencies.

So, we did have a lode test done on the generator about a year ago, that definitely help the generator, because man did, we soot up the next door neighbors with some exhaust, because that thing was just full of some gunk from not running fully loaded. So, what we’re looking at in next steps is to get pricing in plan to have a maintenance contract with CAT or Milton CAT to maintain this thing, because it is a life saving generator. It is packing up a jail and a dispatch center. The next step is replacing a UPS and this is going to be a project in conjunction with Emergency Services and the estimated cost for the UPS for the 911 sites is going to be able $120,000 +/- with the tariffs, and the jail data room one is going to be about $98,000.00 and again those UPSs will be upgraded after the dispatch center does their phone upgrade to their phone system, because there was a process to use the grant money correctly that we have to go through steps. But this is just a graph that we took measuring at each of these UPSs, and this is kind of what it looks like.

HODGSON: You can see how much noise on the signal is being generated by these UPSs and one of the most detrimental pieces of it is that black line that’s in the center is supposed to be a neutral. So, when you have a lot of noise on a neutral and if you look at, that’s roughly one, a little bit more than one full cycle of that sign wave. You see how tight that harmonics are on that, so your talking sub-one thousandths of a second. So, like a standard UPS that’s on your desk that protects your computer can really only take out transients that are one cycle per second. So, these transients go right through computer UPSs and other things that are at that jail that damages that electronic equipment.

JONES: Yeah, and it would damage the CAD computers and their phone computers at the dispatch center due to this issue. It actually ruined auto cards that they had to replace.

STANLEY, MATT: Is that the same file wave that was in the slide a few slides before or different component?

HODGSON: So, one of them was measuring them without any of the surge suppression work that we’ve done. We can’t take this out, because right at the device. So, we went way upstream, right where the utility comes into the building to make sure that we’re not getting any of the harmonic distortion from the grid. We’re trying to kill it there at the source, but really the UPS itself needs to be replaced. The internals of that have the capability of having harmonic filters on them, but this is so old, it actually have failed capacitors, like there’s nothing that we’re going to be able to do, it needs to be replaced.

STANLEY, MATT: But this isn’t a cleaned up graph of what the old one was?

DOUGAN: This is internal noise is what you’re saying and what he was giving you before was exterior?

JONES: At the source.

HODGSON: So, right now, what you saw distorted, previously, we have a nice clean sign wave coming from the source into the building, but we have to do something about this, because it’s internal.

Jones: We’ve actually had the company come out and look at this, has looked at this UPS and have told us it’s near it’s end of life and should be replaced and said, you can put money into fixing some of the filtering that’s built into it, but that cost outweighs the benefit because the rest of the unit will need to be replaced at the same time.

MENSER: Have you considered contacting the Department of Defense? They have load banks for these generators that they surplus out and I believe the policy is that municipalities can get those for free, rather than bidding on them.

JONES: We can look into that.

DOUGAN: We haven’t yet. We have used that process for federal equipment in the past, let me just jump in here. Nate, who just introduced himself, is, he graduated now with your…

JONES: I just have to finish my thesis.

DOUGAN: Okay, he’s also, he’s been enrolled in Clarkson, in the year that he’s been here, he is also getting his master’s in electronical engineering. So, us being able to find the stuff inhouse, because you guys have helped me get better people here to do some of these things inhouse, not to go off track here, but vendors what to sell a service, but they may not want to sell the service to you that you need. So, by having Todd has a licensed PE and Hugh as a graduated mechanical engineer and Andrew as a project manager, who’s really done the construction himself and getting Nate, here have been able to build some inhouse expertise enough to figure some of this stuff out for us, when in the past, vendors are just trying to sell us stuff. Buy another service contract with us, yeah, we were the original designers. So, I won’t say on track on that too much, but that’s what’s made the difference in finding some of these things out to come up with those fixes, but that’s a great idea. We have other sites, what Todd said about this building is because of its service classification really that load bank testing should really be done every year and it hadn’t been done for quite some time and the same thing goes with many of our tower sites. So, the idea of having a load bank test would be good, could be something that we could share with the towns, it may be adding another service for me to try and get done with the same amount of people that we got to figure out how to do that, but that’s a piece of equipment we haven’t considered for Federal surplus in the past.

MENSER: Because I used to be licensed to operate those generators for the Marine Corp., but they have load banks and they’re variable. So, whatever the generator puts out, it can absorb 100% of it, if necessary or any portion that is needed.

DOUGAN: At one point, Emergency Services was going to try and use one of their grants to try to get that, recognizing now and a new generation at Emergency Services, as well, is that is something that we should be doing, but they were, they had some other things that were already in that grant application.

HARWOOD: We want to keep the generator that we have right now, because it has no death. It is a huge diesel generator as well.

DOUGAN: So, the generator itself is 1.25MW, that’s a monster, that’s a monster, we would like to make it run for as long as we can. DEF: that’s that exhaust system that we now all have on all our trucks and so our plow trucks and stuff consistently give up trouble.

CLARK: All the time.

DOUGAN: So, we’re going to try and make that last as long as we can without having to go that, but we do one that size. That’s’ hopefully a ways down the line.

HARWOOD: That’s the point of having a load bank to extend its life.

JONES: And with a maintenance contract, it’s up to the CAT standards to make sure it’s running at its peak performance.

HODGSON: We will be asking for that money, because we can’t afford to lose that generator and I don’t even know that we would even have a New York State DEC stack monitor on that generator, just because of its size. So, I just want you to keep in mind that maintaining that generator is very, very important so that we can avoid future cost.

HARWOOD: My name is Hugh Harwood, I am assistant civil engineer for DPW, I am working with Todd and Jim, I have been here 6-7 years, but the same thing with what Todd went with the electric. We’re just going to do some history, I mean we’ve been through this a little bit, but it’s been a while, I think we started this is 2021-2022, so I will try and quickly go through that, please stop me if you have any questions and then we’ll see what’s ahead of us. A little prior history, in 2021 we had to replace a heating coil on Rooftop 7A that directly services the dispatch center, at about $15,800. As we started looking at this rooftop units were starting to get to the end of their lives. So, we wanted to start looking at those, which brough us into the control system. The control system, just simply to replace the rooftop units, which there are 8 up there plus a few other mixed air handlers, as well. The control system that we have now, Encore, gave a price of $260,000.00, just to upgrade their controls when we were replacing the rooftop unit. At that point, we stepped back, we did not like that price point. The company itself, we do not truly enjoy working with, it’s a proprietary control system. So, they’re really a proprietary system, so imagine like really basically paying for a subscription for the control system, when we should be the owners, we pay for it, we should own it. So, we kind of wanted to go down the road of trying to get a divorce settlement with these people, try to move away from them. So, that obviously started moving us to, okay, we need to start to think bigger picture. How do we move away from the controls while we’re replacing the rooftop units. As Todd stated, this is a Group I-3 classification building, but we don’t have to dive into that, again, but a good thing to know is Danforth did an investigation for energy evaluation in 2016, at that time the Public Safety was our newest building, Nutrition and Ag and Youth Building are the next newest. The Public Safety is out biggest energy hog, mainly with that, with the rooftop units there’s no energy recovery, we can dive a little bit farther into the next couple of slides but think about this beautiful cold weather that we had this morning or even last night. We are totally heating up that air coming into the system and then we’re exhausting it. We’re not recapturing that air, bringing it back to the rooftop unit to then supply that back into the space. So, it is straight heating up the -15 air, and then it’s just exhausting it. So, again, energy hog and also, with that, the history of the boiler failure, so we have, going into the next couple of slides, we have a huge, short cycling with the boilers. We’ve cracked, in the 18 years, we’ve cracked 8 heat exchangers. A heat exchanger should last you about 15 years. There are 3 boilers in there. So, a lot of short cycling, which you can go to the next slide. This is a graph of the short cycling so a constant up and down, up and down, up and down. These boilers, there’s 3 of them, they’re $2.5 million BTU boilers, each one. They want to just ride nice and low, idle, coast, coast, because they’re so strong, when it’s -20 out, the boiler plant lode, 50%, it can go a lot more. So, when it’s in shoulder seasons and when it’s the winter, this winter has been really cold, but normal winters, they are short cycling, on, off, on off. So, that’s a lot of what happens with the heat exchangers that crack. Also, with the energy consumption, think about, I don’t think it’s quite the way now, with the new vehicles, but older vehicle, at least I was always told, if you start your vehicle, you don’t want to turn it off and then turn it back on, because you’re actually wasting a lot of fuel to start it up, so the same thing with these boilers. When they start up, they’re at high firing, they’re using a lot of fuel, a lot of fuel and then all of sudden they just turn off, because they’ve met their heat demand. So, that was a big issue.

Domestic hot water, we have 2-1,500 gallon tanks that are in there, for 3,000 gallons that service just the hot water to the showers, there are only 40 showers in there. My assumption, the reason why it was so large is because they assumed that this building was going to expand by an additional pod. So, massive amounts of domestic hot water, which is basically where we really wanted that hot water on the boiler plant with that short cycling.

Rooftop units; they’re at the end of their life. No energy recovery in the original design, so these are the things that we’re trying to address.

Building management system, so it’s a propriety system, we don’t truly own it. So, again all these four items as we start looking into it are the real issues that we have all within that heating system. These are some past items that we’ve dealt with, I’ll just quickly go through it. In 2023, we replaced our last heat exchanger, which was #7. We still have another heat exchanger that’s cracked, so we replaced that for $43,000.00, that $43,000.00 is at us installing it. DPW has made a crane to be able to install the heat exchanger itself, because after the first couple we figured it would be nice to save some money and do it ourselves. In 2024; evaluation of performance issues and thermal mass. The thermal mass is what we did, because of the short cycling, there’s no water volume in the boilers, so it heats up the very small amount of water very quickly and turns off. So, our way of finding out, to address the short cycling, was taking those, repurposing those 3,000 gallons, those 1,500 gallon hot water tanks and hooking them up to the boiler system. So, now the boiler is actually heating those 3,000 gallons, so it allows that boiler to just kind of idle, with that we then replaced the other 3,000 gallons with 3-85 gallon in direct heaters for the hot water showers, so we kind of killed two birds with one stone. We addressed the large amount of water for the showers, and we actually eliminated the short cycling for the boilers.

In 2025, these kind of all go together. In 2025 we had AES Northeast, they did 60% level design for the kitchen HVAC. So, there is a commercial kitchen in there which has had problems in of itself, a lot of humidity issues in the kitchen, so that is a problem, that is a difficulty in itself, but a lot of humidity issues. So, they’ve got us to 60% level design. That has been completed. So, all of these have been completed, which they have only gone to 60% because currently, that’s in process, they’re going through 60% level design for everything else. So, we should be having that at the end of the week on this Friday, actually, and we’ve going to do our review and then hopefully we’ll get into more of the final design. Between those, we actually replaced the controls. This is our first step, this is how we got our foot into the door. We placed the controls in the boiler room. Totally open system, we own it. Theres not a constant where you have to keep paying someone for a subscription. It’s built, ready to go, we actually have it in operation at the moment. We can add on to it, it’s open source, like I said, this is the first stage of controls migration. We want to see how we can do this now, moving into when we have to replace the rooftops units, that’s when we will replace the rest of those controls.

A little snip, as I talked about before, energy recovery. This is a rooftop; this is actually what we see at the courthouse. This is our controls automation system at the courthouse. This is a the rooftop unit, so they have outside air coming in, goes to the fan, goes to supplier into the building, from the building, comes back to the same unit, return air and it can mix or just straight exhaust. This is actually was done this morning, we have a return air of 75.7°, 2.3° outside at that moment, it is mixing to 50° temperature. So, we’re actually, instead of the boiler having to bring it up from 2.3° to let’s say 80°, 70° depending on what the demand is, it only has to bring it up from 50°. Right now, with the Public Safety Building, it’s having to heat up that air, right from 2°, all that heat for it just to exhaust it straight out. So, that’s a lot of the energy recovery, so the boilers don’t have to work as hard and things like that. So, just a quick little snip on kind of the energy recovery. Now, this is exactly how it would be like at the Public Safety Building, but the concept is all the same. It’s difficult to do energy recovery at a jail, because all the security, the metal in the walls, you have to have grade certain duct work, it’s just for security purposes for the jail, it’s kind of a little bit of a monster, but we have a solution and we’ve been addressing that with the design for it. I will pass it off the Todd, but if there are any questions?

DOUGAN: So, a real quick synopsis, you know the jail began operation in 2007, so we’re getting real close to 20 years. So, we were coming to end of the life on all those rooftop units anyhow, no matter what, thus the heat exchangers, thus the one rooftop unit, the relatively inexpensive piece to replace, that has turn into all of this. So, it was going to be time to change the rooftop units anyhow, we were coming to that. Ideally, if I could, I would put one rooftop in a year or one every five years and we would have consistent budgeting, but there’re no real ability to do this, especially with the control system, especially with the addition of energy recovery. We don’t have to add energy recovery, we don’t have to, they didn’t design it originally and our costs will be more this time around.

HARWOOD: And it’s preliminary at the moment, but we’ve seen a 2,000 gallon savings on propane.

DOUGAN: On propane since we switched out from what we were doing.

PIERCE: Over what period of time?

DOUGAN: One year

HARWOOD: Yup, which that’s very preliminary, we have to get more of the information for it.

DOUGAN: Because our deliveries, it’s just a little bit harder to coordinate it. It’s also hard to coordinate it with the warmer weather last year versus this year, but that’s what we’re seeing so far. I just want to, we’re not just doing this project to do, it’s time to replace the rooftop units anyhow. If we’re going to replace them should we talk about heat recovery? It’s probably more disruption to the Sheriff when we go do this, but you know, Mike can tell you as former Director to Community Resources, whenever we met with towns, whenever we built a new sewer plant, whenever we built a new water plant, we always told you, you might be able to get some help for capital costs to build it initially, but nobody’s coming to help you with operations and maintenance. Everybody’s talking about energy costs, right now, so we’re hoping to, when it’s time to replace the rooftop units, we’re hoping to add some of these things that long term help our operations and maintenance costs as well, but it’s more work, it’s more of a disruption and it’s going to be more of a cost this first time around. Todd is probably going to get into more of that cost and believe me, I’ll beat him up more when this meeting is over on those costs, right, but go ahead.

HODGSON: Yeah, so quickly going through the schedule of what’s in front of us, schematic design we hope to have completed in the spring of 2026. Construction documents, final design on July 2026. That means that we are going to be looking to bid something in the fall of 2026. So, the capital improvement budget that we need will be coming back to you folks, looking for what we will take out of reserve to our capital improvement towards this project. Again, in the fall of 2026. That will be individually purchasing the rooftop units themselves, so what we would be more comfortable doing is actually owning those rooftops units and giving them to the contractor that will be installing them. That saves cost of the markup on that equipment, plus we know exactly what’s going in so we dictate a little but more of the build.

DOUGAN: So, as we, just to jump in there, again, every time an engineer puts something out to bid for you, and your Purchasing Agent will tell you the same thing, we might have a basis of design, piece of the equipment that we want to use, but then we have to list two others that would meet the thing or we would have to put in or equal, right and so when you think about connecting to existing duct work up there at that building and connecting to electrical and the roof framing as these units that have energy recovery on them are probably going to be a little heavier. When you think about all that, do you want to put that whole thing out to bid and leave that up to a contractor? No, so if we already know what units we have, we can control that piece again, plus we won’t pay the markup and we can finalize those drawings with the actual unit that we’re going to use. So, just two reasons to do it.

HARWOOD: Jim just went to you for the Phase Two, for the HVAC and conducts, because of that that should get us close to the end of those conducts, but we’re going to have the one last and final phase to finish up those construction documents. So, these are things that we’re looking ahead, cost to be determined, again all depends on this Friday, we’re going to have the 60% level drawing, we’re going to have a lot more information when we get to that point, but just Phase Three, this will finish up construction documents so that we can put it out to bid.

For authorization to out to be for the HVAC equipment, again, cost to be determined, waiting 60% level design, but these are the things that we would be coming back to you for the approval. Again, for the equipment, we do want to try and maintain control over this project as much as possible. We don’t want to just hand it off, because what we’ve learned a lot, especially with the boiler project, is we need to be an educated and informed owner. You know, I am not throwing stones to anybody in the past, but there have been times with projects where just, we have an employee involved with it. It takes a lot more work, take time to go through these steps, a lot of informing the Board, a lot of us going with the actual engineering firm, but being an educated owner, it helps, we’re trying to guide the engineer, rather than the engineer trying to us, you know, rather than the contractor trying to guide us. We want to be the owner, in order to be the owner and make the right decisions, we need to be pretty well informed. So, that’s why we want to put that HVAC equipment out to bid for this fall. So, then for the springtime, optional time to actually to do the construction. We want to do spring or fall, because it’s shoulder season.

DOUGAN: You guys can, the Board can hopefully see, you the Board have some pretty smart guys that work for you at DPW and so we use the concept that we call, design management. These are pretty smart guys, but don’t have the horsepower to create full sets of drawings or make sure that every bit of it meets code on our own. So, I need these guys to do design management with a consultant. You don’t get the consultant carte blanche and so that’s what they’re doing. Even the project, the replacement of the hot water heating system was more of these guys, really questioning an engineer. We had this engineering firm, there, side by side with us, but it was really their thought process and their design, because in a way, they’re the owner, too, these guys are. So, but, just if we could and Todd would love me to have an engineering department that’s big enough that we did all the design, all these drawings and all these things in house, but that’s, there’s a lot of horsepower there, there’s a lot of big heavy-duty equipment and programs and all those things that we’ve got other things to spend that money on right now. So, we try and use some of those consultants as a tool to walk alongside us, give them a piece and make sure that we’re leading that design for us.

CLARK: I was fortunate enough to have a little tour of that office, the work that they did in that boiler system, I have worked in huge plants before as a welder, not a designer, by any means. It was pretty incredible the workmanship that was done in there. The crane system to change components out, genius, I mean it works. Now you don’t have to have somebody come in and set up a temporary crane, the welding was better than I can and I’m a pretty good welder, it was nice. It was just a good clean setup the way they did it, too. It was more impressive than I thought it would be.

DOUGAN: So, we will be bringing it to you, when we get those costs updates, after the 60%, we will be bringing that to you. We will be questioning it even before it comes to you. That doesn’t mean that I don’t expect you to question me or come up with other ideas, but we will be questioning it. I will be, like I said, beating Todd up on a regular basis. He is my deputy, but we, our relationship is one where we put the fists up and go after it on a regular basis on costs. So, what else do you guys have?

THURSTON: I have a question, and I am not sure who this goes to, I would assume Todd, but maybe not. The generator that you’re talking about for the Public Safety Building is incredibly large, is it, would it behoove us to get two smaller generators that way we would have a contingency plan, in case? You know we have seen it at our wastewater treatment plant; you know one thing goes down and the generator and now we don’t have another source. Does that make sense, Todd?

HODGSON: It does, especially when it comes time to replace the generator.

We want to prolong that as much as possible, but when we come to a replacement period and let me just make this comment, too, because this applies to anybody that has an emergency generator for like a water or wastewater plant, those generators tend to me slightly oversized in part because some of the harmonics that exist with vertical frequency drives and other treatment plant equipment that exists with these generators power. So, I would like to tell you that we could reduce the size of that generator, and we may do that when that time comes, but you still need to have a large enough generator to overpower those harmonic issues that exist in that building and having staged generation is one aspect. I’ll tell you another thing, as we deal with Emergency Services and collaborate a little bit more with them, I would like to investigate some level of battery energy storage. That may address a few different issues, I haven’t given Jim the dollar figure on that, but if you think about it, rather than even wasting all that energy doing that load test, we can actually be pushing all that power into a battery for those instances, putting that generator under full load, so that that way we’re actually storing all that energy rather than just burning fuel and it gives us the closest thing that we could come to, to a close transition like I was talking to about before, where we have a battery has a buffer to be able to switch between sources without causing those, you know the energization and the reenergization of some of this critical equipment. So, we would really like to look at battery energy storage for that, maybe get a grant to help us accomplish that because it is going to be a significant dollar figure to at least get that up and running, but we’ll see how that goes with Emergency Services.

THURSTON: So, that brings me to my next question, because that was part of this second of this two part question, was the possibility of getting some NYSERDA grants to do solar generation down there and also have a battery energy storage facility for that.

HODGSON: Yeah, up here in the North Country, I mean your facility, we are an afterthought when it comes to the utility company. So, up here we are not their primary concern, so having an ability to equip ourselves to deal with some of the power sags that we get hit with, I think is going to be increasingly more important, especially as more things become electrically powered.

THURSTON: Is there room down there for solar?

HODGSON: If we did canopies over the parking lot.

THURSTON: No kind of vertical ones like we have at the wastewater treatment plant?

HODGSON: There’s not a lot of real estate there.

DOUGAN: A portion of our property is even under a conservation easement.

THURSTON: Oh, okay

DOUGAN: So, for the new Supervisors or for any of the Supervisors, when I talked about our department and I said that we recognize that we have to be reactionary, a big part of DPW is react to snow and react to a building breaking down and stuff like that, but we’re really trying to be as proactive and as planning as we can, knowing that we have to react at some point. So, that’s a lot of what these guys are highlighting for you that you know, we’ve been able to do it by bringing in a few people. They have a high standard of care, that’s a little statement that I bring about these guys all the time and we’re not going to find everything, but we trying to have a good idea ahead of time and I like Todd’s battery thought process. I think a grant; some kind of a grant agency is going to really like that when it’s this kind of a building and what it produces. So, we’re trying to find a source of funding for it, too, rather than just telling you we need more money.

REUSSER: Maybe NYSEG will pay for it, seeing they can’t provide us…

DOUGAN: We’re going to be talking more about NYSEG, we’re going to be talking more about smart meters, we’re going to be bringing that in the near future and how that affects all the energy consumption that we have. We have brought our energy consumption down since 2017-18 by installing LED lights and stuff like that. We brought it down by over 500,000 kilowatts, but right now it’s looking like it has spiked again, our energy consumption, not just our dollars. Smart meters are taking some of those harmonics and you’re getting charge for that harmonic, so I am spouting off, right now, these guys will backup my statement over time and we’ll prepare that for you and we’ll give that ammunition as you guys fight that fight with legislatures and others, but I don’t have it there, yet.

REUSSER: Maybe we should connect the Public Service Commission with complaints about the smart meter malfunctioning.

DOUGAN: Let me know shoot from the hip, I shoot from the hip all the time, he gives me the real bullets all the time, I usually hit the target, but he makes sure I hit the bullseye. So, but let me get that information for you guys, but we’re aware of it.

HODGSON: And it does affect more than just us.

DOUGAN: It affects all of you.

REUSSER: Residential

HODGSON: Anybody that has a water/wastewater facility especially because the smart meter is recording all that inductive load that the other meters missed, but good thoughts and we will get together.

DOUGAN: Anything else?

CLARK: Is that all you have for us? One thing that I would like to state is, let’s get a contract for maintenance on that generator. It’s old enough, it’s a good one and I am all for maintenance. I think we’re done, thank you.

AS THERE WAS NO FURTHER BUSINESS TO COME BEFORE THIS BUILDING AND FACILITIES TASK FORCE, IT WAS ADJOURNED AT 9:53 AM

Respectively Submitted,

Dina Garvey, Deputy Clerk

Board of Supervisors