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Committee approves $___ boiler replacement project after engineers recommend replacing three jail hot-water boilers
Summary
The Finance Committee approved a resolution to increase the sheriff's boiler replacement capital budget following engineering recommendations that replacing all three jail domestic hot-water boilers at once is more cost-effective than piecemeal repairs.
The Warwick County Finance Committee on Feb. 20 approved Resolution No. 3-25, increasing the capital budget for the sheriff's office hot-water boiler system replacement and transferring funds from general fund building reserves and excess funds from the government center boiler project.
Project manager Joe Latosha told the committee one of the three domestic boilers serving the jail is “down hard” and not repairable; the other two are aging and have required multiple repairs. He said that trying to integrate a single new high-efficiency digital boiler with two older analog boilers would require costly workarounds and could force the new unit to run inefficiently. The recommended approach is a full replacement of all three units at once to obtain modern controls and higher efficiency (projected roughly from 80% up to about 97%).
Latosha and public works staff explained the higher-than-anticipated bid results reflected recent short-term changes in market pricing, potential tariff effects on metals and the increased scope of replacing three units rather than one. They estimated life-cycle expectations for the new boilers at roughly 15 years.
Supervisors asked whether alternatives such as heat pumps had been considered; staff said the scale and continuous domestic-hot-water demand made conventional boilers the most viable option. The project is already included in the capital improvement plan for later years, but the committee approved moving forward now because one unit is irreparably failed.
A voice vote approved the resolution; the committee then directed staff to continue project oversight and to include the replacement in the county's capital project schedule.
