SCHENECTADY Heating war has Council boiling Elected officials arrive at night, find room sweltering BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter
The annual heat war at City Hall has come to an abrupt end after City Council members discovered the building at 85 degrees in the middle of the night last week. Poor heat circulation through City Hall — and intense differences of opinion on what temperature is acceptable — has always led to a heat war between the departments on the far ends of the building. If the Finance Department is comfortable, the City Clerks are boiling. This year’s war began a few weeks ago when the sweating city clerks tried to turn the heat down, which made the finance workers freeze. Finance retaliated by jacking up the heat until the city clerks flung open their windows. Buildings and Grounds Supervisor Ed Montgomery put locked cages around the thermostats to keep employees from changing them, but they used paperclips to adjust the temperature anyway. City Council members were less than thrilled to stumble upon the symptoms of the war when they arrived for a 7:30 a.m. budget meeting and discovered the heat blasting into an empty building. One of the thermostats had died in battle, leaving heat pouring into the city clerk’s side of the building. It was 85 degrees in the clerk’s office and the seldom-used council meeting room, Room 110, and it stayed that way all weekend. By the time Monday night’s council committee meeting started, after the broken thermostat had been fixed, the temperature had finally dropped to 75. But by then it was too late for the warring parties — council members were ready to impose a temperature treaty that will lead to a significant savings in energy costs this winter. The bad news: the heat will go down to 70. The good news: it may save the city more than 5 percent on its winter utility bills. “People are opening windows. This is nuts. There could be savings here,” said Councilwoman Barbara Blanchard, who called together department heads and the city’s private energy-savings contractor, Siemens, to solve the problem. At the committee meeting, Siemens explained that parts of City Hall are legitimately cooler than others. The building is heated by steam, so the areas it hits first — like the city clerk’s office and Room 110 — are much warmer than the areas it reaches last. But if Siemens installs small gas heaters for infrequently used rooms, such as Room 110 and the council chambers, more steam will reach the coldest parts of the building. “You can drop this room to 40 degrees,” Siemens Account Executive Tom Garrett said, referring to Room 110. That would send more heat to the finance office, possibly ending the temperature conflict. At night, he said, the council may be able to reduce its energy bill by another 3 percent by lowering the temperature to 62 degrees. Siemens tried lowering the night temperature to 60 degrees last winter but couldn’t warm up the building before workers arrived in the morning, he said. Blanchard wanted a night-time temperature of 55 degrees, but Garrett said the city would actually lose money trying to warm the building up in the morning. “It’s because you’ve got this marble slab,” he said, referring to the marble used throughout the building. “It doesn’t take a lot of energy to keep it at a certain point. We’ll get back to you with small fine-tunings that can add up to quite a bit, but we don’t know what we can do until we test it.” Until then, the clerks may have to suffer. Even after workers repaired the thermostat on Monday, it was still a balmy 75 degrees, so the clerks spent the day with a window open. “We have to. It’s too hot in here,” said City Clerk Carolyn Friello. “I don’t want it to be too cold, but when it’s this hot, you’re too tired to work.”
They continuously win green awards from the league of conservation voters for these types of things (and the fact that they are all democrats in office.) Energy efficiency at it's best.
"While Foreign Terrorists were plotting to murder and maim using homemade bombs in Boston, Democrap officials in Washington DC, Albany and here were busy watching ME and other law abiding American Citizens who are gun owners and taxpayers, in an effort to blame the nation's lack of security on US so that they could have a political scapegoat."
A taj mahal like Niskayuna? They should lower the thermostat in City Hall to 50 degrees. There is plenty of hot air from the wall to wall Democrats to warm the entire building.
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A taj mahal like Niskayuna? They should lower the thermostat in City Hall to 50 degrees. There is plenty of hot air from the wall to wall Democrats to warm the entire building.
