Chilmark tackles first piece of school HVAC project

Planners look to break the ice on decade-long progress standstill.

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Chilmark School officials voted at Tuesday’s Up-Island Regional School District meeting to move forward with a piece of the school HVAC overhaul project that has been tripped up for a decade. 

Chilmark energy committee chair Rob Hannemann prefaced his presentation at the meeting by saying, “This is not a happy report.”

Upon completion of an engineering design plan that illustrates how the Chilmark School can bring the HVAC system into the 21st century, Hannemann said, the joint working group that oversees the project intended to put the bid out in December, but it didn’t go out until mid-March.

“We only received a single bid in return to the advertisement — that bid was three times what we had allocated for funding for that job,” Hannemann said. “I could do forensics on all the places our project management went awry, but I’m not certain that is the most productive use of our time.”

Hannemann said putting such a large project out to bid so late, and the nature of looking for qualified contractors to come to Martha’s Vineyard, are two of the main stumbling blocks in making steady progress with the HVAC upgrade.

Based on recent failed efforts to fund almost the entire project through Green Communities grants, Hannemann explained, “it is very clear we cannot do the whole project right away.”

According to Hannemann, no on-Island contractors are certified to work on projects over $150,000, creating another hurdle. 

In the spirit of breaking the ice on the project and making a positive impact on the Chilmark School, Hannemann suggested bringing the building up to code in regard to insulation in the ceilings. Additionally, he advocated for installing new thermostats throughout the school that would bolster energy efficiency. The insulation will make it such that when the school can continue moving ahead with more major elements of the project, those improvements will have the greatest benefit. New thermostats will provide better control and monitoring of temperature control in the school. This work is anticipated to wrap up before the end of summer.

School officials approved the use of $126,000 in Green Communities funds, with the remaining cost of the approximately $140,000 mini-project to be covered by previously earmarked funds from 2017. A $160,000 spending cap was also placed on the mini-project.

Hannemann noted that even if the larger HVAC project is put off further, the initial insulation and thermostat work “would provide an absolute improvement to the school on its own.”

“We are not going to spend money that is wasted if we don’t continue with the rest of the project,” he said.