Sanbornton committee favors 'cold storage' facility for DPW trucks

With all the prospective building plans facing the town, the Board of Selectmen’s building committee revealed two major decisions at its meeting Monday night in the town office building.

One was the committee’s ruling to recommend the selectmen put the building of a new cold storage structure for the Department of Public Works (DPW) at the top of its list of projects for the 2008-2009 budget.

The other announcement, made by committee member and former selectman Patsy Wells in passing, was that the group apparently understands it’s not going to consider moving ahead with tentative plans to create a municipal “campus” in the village for probably another two years.

At the annual Town Meeting in May voters agreed to spend $49,5000 to purchase about 2-acres of land behind the old Town Hall that could someday be used for a new Town Hall. The tentative plans discussed by the selectmen before the vote included converting the current town office facility into a police station and turning the public safety building now shared by the fire and police departments over to the fire department.

But since then the town has had to come to grips with the information that its roads are in need of major repair over the next few years. Many residents seem to support the idea in the wake of significant damage caused by summer rains in recent years.

At last night’s meeting, Committee Chairman Jim Jenkins suggested the group recommend to the Selectboard that the building challenges the DPW is facing are more significant than anything else that might be on the agenda in the future.

Member Wayne Elliott, who works for the DPW, made a formal motion that the DPW’s “cold storage” facility should go on the top of the list of town projects. Wells seconded the idea and it passed the committee unanimously.

But just because the committee backs the idea doesn’t mean it will please DPW Director John “Hub” Hubbard.

Before the vote, Elliott passed around photographs of several steel structures that would be similar to a building the director would like to see replace the current town garage.

“Hub is trying to show us what he would like for a heated facility — the maintenance bays and office space — to replace the current building,” Jenkins explained to the other committee members. “He’s going to come forward with some kind of floor plan, and that’s what these pictures are. They’re just opening that door so we can see what’s in his mind. It would be an engineered steel building.”

Looking over the photographs, member Jim VanValkenbugh noted that they included a significant amount of space for storing DPW trucks. “Tilton’s building also serves as a transfer station," he said. They don’t store their trucks there.”

As the conversation continued the committee members credited the DPW with completing what Jenkins called “Phase I” of the work needed on its property by replacing the old salt shed — which state officials said was leaking into a local waterway — with a new, inexpensive structure.

They also said a steel building was a good, economical way to go with the town garage.

But the issue of erecting a large heated garage to hold all the DPW vehicles kept coming back up.

“Hub is for doing away with the cold storage,” Wells pointed out. “He wants that.”

But Wells said she was concerned the building project might not gain enough voter support at the Town Meeting to pass.

Member Carmine Cioffi agreed. “If you want to do something and you want it to pass, you want to keep it reasonable.”

Wells asked the other committee members about the advantages and disadvantages of keeping the DPW’s trucks inside.

“The main thing is the hydraulics,” said Elliott.

“When you have cold hydraulics it’s hard on them,” VanValkenbugh said.

But Jenkins said it wouldn’t make much difference since once a truck is out in the cold the hydraulics would soon get cold.

Elliott refuted that, saying the hydraulic system continues “pumping” all the time the vehicle is in use — so the system stays warm.

Other members pointed out that when trucks are in a heated space the salt on them could damage the concrete floor.

But Jenkins had a larger point. “I’m a big believer in cold storage (i.e., keeping the vehicles in a non-heated ‘open’ building) because of the interaction of the salt on the truck. There’s a certain temperature where salt works on the metal. I believe the zone is somewhere between 18 and 36 degrees. If you bring that truck in, you travel through that zone. And each time you bring it out, you go through that zone.

“The thought process of somebody trying to protect steel in those trucks is to leave them in that constant (outdoor) temperature so you don’t have that rust and salt eating at them.

“I like the smaller trucks being inside to hit those spot problems that come up,” the chairman added. “But as far as the fleet goes…”

Wells said that she recently traveled in Alaska and saw most plow trucks there stored outside. “Each had a block heater in it… It’s a lot cheaper to run block heaters than it is to heat a building.”

With the majority of the trucks outside, the building could be smaller and thus cheaper — and more likely to win voter approval, she added.

The rest of the members agreed with her.

After the vote, Jenkins said the group had only several weeks to come up with idea for a “cold storage” facility.

Reflecting back on the “campus” idea, Wells said she hoped the town would choose to borrow money to pay for all the building projects related to the project in 2010, after both the “cold storage” facility and the heated town garage were built.

Before the meeting adjourned, member Don Foudriat raised concerns about another building issue, the renovations scheduled to go on in the old Town Hall. Foudriat said that he was speaking in his role as town moderator and pointed out that there are five elections coming up in 2008 and it was his responsibility to make sure the voting went smoothly.

Wells, who is chair of the subcommittee overseeing the Town Hall project, told Foudriat she had no reason to think there would be any problems even as restoration work on the historic building took place in the coming months.