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Date: 9/15/2021
EASTHAMPTON – The Easthampton City Council officially approved a bond amount of up to $6.4 million across 20 years for city upgrades to Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) due to the pandemic, as well as energy-efficient and environmentally-conscious infrastructure improvements in certain buildings throughout the city to help reduce the city’s carbon footprint.
The council approved the bond amount unanimously during a Sept. 1 public hearing. The bond will now allow the city to negotiate and execute an Energy Savings Performance Contract under Mass. General Law Department of Energy Resources (DOE) procurement to begin these upgrades and improvements sometime in October. They are working with Honeywell to complete this project. Honeywell was selected as a partner during a bid process that occurred in late-2020 and early-2021.
The project will include IAQ upgrades at the Easthampton High School, City Hall, the Public Safety Complex and the Water Department. The installation of ultra-violet air-cleaning technologies with sensors that provide continuous IAQ metrics for monitoring and reporting will be included in these upgrades. The project will also provide heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) updates to current deferred maintenance issues in the city, like at City Hall. The broad goal is to filter our air continuously, and prevent the COVID-19 virus from permeating.
Within this scope, rooftop solar will be installed at City Hall, a new canopy structure with solar panels at the Public Safety building and ground mount solar at the Wastewater Plant. The total cost of the project came out to $6.16 million between the five buildings in focus, but a contingency cost of $308,345 controlled by the city raised the price to $6.4 million.
The solar energy savings from this project amounts to $130,479, a figure that is guaranteed by Honeywell. In other words, whatever return the city receives from energy savings, Honeywell is guaranteeing this amount back to Easthampton. If excess savings is achieved, then the city gets to keep all those savings.
The total annual cost to the budget over the course of 20 years is $191,898. This money will be taken out of a general fund each year and will not be paid from an increase in taxes. With the guarantees provided to the city, an original yearly bond of $391,000 was reduced to the $191,898 figure.
“On the technical side, we are sitting down with our department heads and Honeywell and finalizing the scope,” said Mayor Nicole LaChapelle, regarding the next steps after the bond. The city is currently looking at return on investment and what changed in prices. “We will finalize the scope and then the contract and send it to the DOE for review along with our city attorney.”
While this is happening, the financial process of the project will continue, according to LaChapelle. The city will work with their bond attorney, financial advisor, and treasurer to set up a bond sale. The soonest they would be able to put out the bond for selling would most likely be the first week of October. “By the time we go out to bond, we will have the final scope of what the city will have done,” added the mayor. “While the bond sale date is the big-ticket item, we’re working really hard on everything else in this project.” The mayor may also use other state or federal funds for the project.
LaChapelle spoke to energy service companies about three years ago about what this type of project could provide to Easthampton. Due to other priorities they had at that point, it did not make sense for the project to move forward.
“The pandemic really was the tipping point when we started at air quality…we started looking at the equipment that kept our equipment just above acceptable,” said LaChapelle, regarding why the project became a recent priority. “The opportunity to address not only renewable energy and increase that in our portfolio … but there is a very concrete savings in the city over 20 years.” The mayor said that the city could save approximately $2.3 million over these 20 years.
When the project was first officially put forward, the total cost amounted to $12 million, so the mayor conducted meetings with city Treasurer Jen Gallant, DPW Director Greg Nuttelman, and School Building Committee member Michael Owens to figure out what are the immediate priorities so the price can decrease. The original scope under the project also included electric vehicle chargers, but those were taken out before bond approval because the mayor believes that there are more cost-effective methods from the state to install them. She is also looking into dual input battery chargers in that vein.
When Reminder Publishing spoke to LaChapelle about deferred maintenance after the bond vote, the mayor used City Hall-which is a building with no windows-as an example that currently features all recycled circulated air. When the building’s HVAC systems break, the city would usually need to spend money on putting a “band aid” on the system. Due to the hall’s old age, this is a method LaChapelle would like to avoid.
“Of course, we don’t want to do that,” said LaChapelle, regarding band-aiding the system. “Even more importantly, we don’t want to deal with a Monday morning ‘there’s no heat in City Hall’ situation.”
As a result, the project plans to upgrade the system and give a control data dashboard, as well as upgrade the internal workings so they know how air is circulating. If not enough air is circulating, then the city can adjust accordingly. The city will not have to bring in a contract or staff to come in and fix something, and the system overall will run more efficiently and save dollars.
Honeywell presented the project during finance committee meetings on July 14 and Aug. 17, as well as Energy Advisory Committee (EAC) meetings on Aug. 16 and 23. The EAC wrote a letter to the council on Aug. 26 claiming that they were not ready to recommend this bond request for several reasons.
The city did send the complete 2,000-page project proposal to the EAC a couple of days before the Sept. 1 council meeting, but EAC representative Steven Judd said they would need a few weeks to review it all. The EAC is supportive of the concept but had many questions at the time of the council meeting.
The EAC was concerned that the Mountain View School was not included in the scope, even though 130 KWs of additional solar on the new roof could be implemented, as well as some costs that they deemed financially unnecessary, like the proposed solar canopy at the Public Safety Complex. They were also concerned that Honeywell did not consider the 20-year warranty on the Municipal Building that expires in 2027 before looking to install solar panels, among other concerns regarding energy conservation measures.
The actual details of the project may evolve as construction begins next month. The mayor noted that if the council were to not approve the bond now, the price of the project would have run the risk of increasing.
According to Judd, the mayor agreed to meet with the EAC for a more detailed discussion on the scope, but the project will continue with this bond approval. End of construction is estimated for September 2022. More details are found on the Easthampton website.