The assembly pulled the money from “wastewater working capital,” in the hope that the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation will cover the amount with a low-cost loan later this year. The equipment pumps wastewater to the treatment plant on Japonski Island.

Public Works director Ron Vinson said that while the DEC loan wasn’t guaranteed, he felt it was a pretty safe bet, since the department had previously loaned the city $1.3 million for the same project and “they want to see things through.”

Total cost for the project should not exceed $2.8 million.

The assembly approved the appropriation unanimously, wrapping up the evening’s public business in about 20 minutes. The assembly spent the rest of the evening in a closed-door session to discuss employee benefits.

The Sitka Assembly on Tuesday agreed on first reading to set aside $600,000 to replace the heating system in the middle school – a system that was state-of-the-art just eleven years ago.

Thanks to a projected sales tax surplus from this year’s record cruise tourism, finding the money wasn’t really at issue. The assembly’s concerns had more to do with the quick demise of modern equipment, and what the future holds for Sitka’s aging school buildings.

The heating began to fail in Blatchley Middle School last November. The district set up space heaters to keep the building habitable, but repairing the school’s five Mitsubishi heat pumps meant bringing in a refrigeration contractor, who wasn’t able to check on the equipment until Christmas Eve. The contractor ordered a part, which didn’t arrive until February, and then the contractor himself bowed out of the picture.

But that didn’t matter. When the district finally brought in a Mitsubishi specialist, the prognosis was not good.

“There is no amount of preventative maintenance, according to this contractor, that would have alleviated this failure,” said Mike Bartolaba, maintenance director for the Sitka School District.

Bartolaba said the experts traced the problem to the installation of the equipment – directly on the concrete slab – rather than to the heat pumps themselves, which have a service life of somewhere over 15 years. Blatchley Middle School didn’t quite get 10 years out of the pumps, and the warranty expired after seven.

The school buildings in Sitka are owned by the city. Municipal administrator John Leach wanted some answers.

“If these were installed incorrectly, which is what we’re hearing, I want to find out if Mitsubishi signed off on that in the first place,” said Leach. “And I need that question answered. But that’s going to take us some time to evaluate that. It’s not done with just spend the money on the appropriation and call it good. There’s a lot of research we still need to do. But again, it’s very time sensitive, and we need to get heat in the rooms before winter gets here.”

Blatchley Middle School is the only major building in the Sitka District that doesn’t have a redundant heating system. The interruptible electrical service and oil-fired boilers  that are in many public buildings in Sitka were decommissioned when the heat pumps were installed, and bringing them back would be costly. So would attempting to adapt another brand of heat pump to all of the Mitsubishi control and distribution systems.

Ron Vinson, Sitka’s asset manager, suggested that the city take its hard knocks and replace the Mitsubishi heat pumps with the latest equipment from the same manufacturer, renew the warranty, and use the experience to prolong the lives of similar heat pumps throughout the city – eleven in all. 

“If you start identifying issues like the coil failure being, you know, close to finished grade, as we’ve experienced with these, you start figuring out how you can modify your other systems,” Vinson explained. “And so it’s not just a one- off that we can fix the school district’s heat pumps, we can take lessons learned and apply them in other places, too.” 

The Sitka Assembly was not especially enthusiastic, having to consider an emergency appropriation of $600,000 to solve a problem discovered 10 months ago. Member Thor Christianson said what other members may have been thinking. 

“I’m a little irritated by the timing,” Christianson said. “Because, we don’t have a choice. I mean, we’re going to be spending money, whether it’s this or something else. From what I understand there were complaints about the heating system last school year. Why are we only hearing about this now?”

Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz was concerned about the simultaneous failure of five expensive heat pumps. He thought it signaled that larger issues may be looming in the school district.

“I think the need to replace the school buildings is known,” said Eisenbeisz. “But no one’s actually put their foot down and said, we’re going to do this. So I’m hoping that this is also a wake up call to the assembly that issues like this are imminent with our schools, I hope that they’re not – I hope that this isn’t going to continue. But I have a feeling that our school buildings are reaching the end of their useful life without a major rehab. And we need to get ahead of that at this point.”

The assembly unanimously passed on first reading a supplemental budget appropriation of $600,000 to replace the heat pumps – $390,000 for the pumps themselves, plus a 40-percent contingency to cover everything else. A special meeting will likely be called for a second reading, to expedite the repairs.

The appropriation doesn’t specify that the equipment has to be Mitsubishi. Member Thor Christianson quipped, “My answer would be woodstoves everywhere, but I don’t think that’s going to be real popular.”