Tullah County School District staff told trustees the district is piloting a contracted preventive‑maintenance (PM) program for heating, ventilation and air‑conditioning equipment at three schools and that early results already show fewer work orders and improved system oversight.

The pilot places a licensed journeyman HVAC technician from a state‑contract vendor on a monthly PM schedule at Settlement Canyon, Stansbury High School and Tooele High School. Staff said the contractor will perform routine PM work — filters, belts, bearings, rooftop‑unit checks and diagnostics — and will escalate emerging issues before they become major failures.

“Preventative maintenance extends that useful life on those machines,” Silva said while describing the pilot. He told the board that the district had struggled to hire and retain licensed HVAC journeymen in‑house and that the vendor contract provides trained technicians the district could not otherwise afford.

Staff noted several outcomes during the first months of the pilot: a decline in emergency work orders at the pilot schools and earlier identification of problems such as condensation issues that had caused interior leaks. Silva described a recent case in which poor preventative maintenance — not weather — had led to condensation and interior roof leaks that required repair after the pilot identified the root cause.

Cost and scale: staff estimated that adding all buildings to the contracted PM schedule would likely cost between $400,000 and $500,000 per year. Silva and board members observed that the avoided cost of premature equipment replacement (for example, chillers that previously failed because of poor maintenance) could approach a break‑even point if the program were expanded.

Board members asked whether the district could hire the same capacity in‑house instead. Silva said much of the work requires multiple trades and project coordination and that the district had previously employed a project manager but currently lacked that capacity. He and other trustees discussed a mixed approach of retaining critical PM vendor services while rebuilding internal project‑management capacity.

Next steps: staff will monitor the pilot, report measured work‑order reductions and estimate net savings compared with baseline replacement and repair costs. Trustees suggested the district consider staged expansion to additional schools if data show net savings and operational benefit.

Quote attribution: “Our rooftop units, our mechanical units, chillers, boilers, they’re going through the whole thing. That’s super exciting,” Silva said of the pilot; on expansion he noted roughly “it would probably be between 400 and $500,000 to add all the schools onto a PM schedule.”