Repairs to the restrooms at the Pulaski County Courthouse are moving ahead. Last week, the county commissioners selected Malchow Construction of Francesville to make sewage pipe repairs.
County Maintenance Supervisor Jeff Johnston said the company submitted the lower of two bids, for a cost of $12,000. “This is for removal of the concrete above the drainage pipes, replacement of the drainage pipes with PVC and connections, and then filling it back in with concrete,” he explained.
The work will require a temporary relocation of the Pulaski County Emergency Management Agency office. However, Johnston says that barring any unforeseen circumstances, the work should only take two weeks from start to finish, meaning the EMA Department’s equipment could be left in place.
Johnston also told the commissioners that the heating systems at the Pulaski County Courthouse and Annex Building have required some minor repairs recently. He said he plans to look into more permanent solutions once new commissioners and council members take office in January. “The heating system itself isn’t bad, but the way that the pipes run through the building is,” he said. “So you’ve got certain areas of the building it warms, whereas certain other areas it don’t. But the boiler itself is a good one, and if we could just put some money into the individual offices to get the system working well, I think we’d be okay. That’s the cheap way to do it.”
Johnston said a greater expense will be the air conditioning system at the Annex Building. “I’ve got Air Conditioning & HVAC services in Jacksonville, Florida to go in there, that’s been in the field for 30 years, and they haven’t seen one this old since they’ve been doing it, he said. “And we have problems with it every year. It’s all pneumatically-controlled; it’s not electronic. So you open up the control box and you’ve got 500 little hoses to all these different connections.”
Not only is the system difficult and expensive to maintain, it’s also not energy efficient. For now, Johnston says he’s trying to improve efficiency in other areas, such as installing LED lights wherever possible.
