Alamance County’s board of commissioners has agreed to dip into the county’s cache of federal pandemic relief to pay for a long-deferred overhaul of the HVAC system within the county’s human services center.
During a regularly scheduled meeting on Monday, the board voted unanimously to draw just over $1.7 million from the county’s relief allocation to pay for the system’s replacement along with a 15 percent contingency that the county’s administrators recommended.
The commissioners also gave their unanimous nod to a contract with Superior Mechanical, which had submitted a low bid of $1,489,000 to change out the HVAC system within the human services center, which is home to the county’s health and social services departments.
The commissioners ultimately chose to tap the county’s relief allocation directly to pay for this project. In doing so, they bucked a suggestion from the county’s administrators, who had preferred to use a combination of capital reserves and general savings to cover the project’s expense in the short-term and ultimately reimburse those funds with federal pandemic relief.
Prior to Monday’s $1.7 million outlay for the HVAC system, Alamance County’s manager Bryan Hagood had informed the commissioners that the county’s relief allocation, which originally stood at about $32.8 million, had been whittled down to $28,056,391. Hagood added that he would approach the commissioners next month with a list of additional projects that the county could undertake with the remainder of these funds.
