Heating outage at law enforcement center requires $53K solution

The Jasper County Board of Supervisors approved a $53,000 replacement of 10-year-old boilers at the Jasper County Law Enforcement Center at a special meeting on Wednesday.

“Our two boilers that heat the building are basically toast. We have limped one along with the parts from the other, but the vendors have looked at it, they are just too dangerous to fix, in fact, the one remaining blew out yesterday,” Jasper County Sheriff John Halferty said. “We are going into the winter season, and we need heat.”

Halferty said the 50 inmates at the jail are not affected by the outage, and all inmates have both heat and air from an alternative system. The outage affects the remainder of the law enforcement center including office areas.

Supervisor Doug Cupples asked county maintenance director Adam Sparks if there are any positives at looking into a forced air system instead of the boilers. Sparks said the alternative system would be better and more efficient but to put it in place the entire building would have to be gutted the county would be starting from the ground up with costs reaching more than $1 million.

“The building was built in 2005, I came here in 2007 and in 2008 we replaced both of the heat exchangers and boilers then because of supposed backward wiring and the system was running backward,” Sparks said. “They were low dollar boilers to begin with. They should last 20 years, so we’ve already replaced heat exchangers once and we’re barely knocking on 12 years.”

The best move for the county, according to Sparks, is to put in good quality, high-efficiency boilers to get the best money out of the system already in place. Following the approval by the board, Sparks said work had already started to replace the system at the law center.

Contact Jamee A. Pierson at 641-792-3121 ext. 6534 or jpierson@newtondailynews.com