Narragansett Wood Chip Boiler
Looking at the town meeting schedule, it may be time to obtain the minutes and materials from the last planning board meeting. Some new and important information may have surfaced. A few things are on the record already. The cost of wood chips was presented at $36,360.00 per year along with potential annual savings of $234,493.67 based on oil at $3.90 per gallon. Other savings were listed at $190,000.00 based on oil at $3.19 per gallon. What has materialized is the school will be heating with propane for at least 4 months and the wood chips will now cost in the amount that I projected back when this project first surfaced. I wrote a blog on it as well. I am now told the wood chips will be somewhere in the $60.00 per ton range rather than the past $28.00 per ton. The high cost of propane plus the slide in oil prices equate to not much of a savings to start with. There may be problems with the construction plan as well. One thing is for sure, there needs to be an explanation on who made the call to rip out the oil fired boilers in the school before they had all the permits and all the plans were signed off on.
Very few projects go as planned and perhaps it would have been better to plan this project for completion in the fall of 2015. It is my opinion that nothing upsets the taxpayers more than being told one thing while another happens. We were told the chips were going to be cheap and they were going to come from local sources, as in town people. The school said $28.00 per ton, I said $68.00 per ton and now it may be the chips in the $60 plus per ton range. This would not be the first time a project has been sold to Templeton taxpayers as cheap or will lead to big savings then turning out to be very expensive. All I think about is this is the same group trying to sell a new school to Templeton and now this. What the taxpayers deserve is all the cards on the table rather than some grand presentation long on promise and short on delivery. I really wish we had been told that wood chips were going to cost $80.00 per ton and we would be saving $50,000.00 per year and end the year with chips at $64.00 per ton and a 100 thousand dollar savings rather than starting off with chip cost 2 1/2 times what was sold to us at the beginning. I think that trust issue is surfacing again.
Jeff Bennett
At the very least, I think we should ask for updated cost projections for the wood chip boiler installation.
ReplyDeleteI asked where the money would come from in the very unlikely event that the cost projections for this project didn't meet expectations. I was told at a public meeting (town meeting) that the school department would cover the costs. I also asked if the towns' assessments would be reduced if the savings on the heat materialized.
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crickets...crickets...
In the second paragraph Mr. Bennet questions the fiscal responsibility of this project eluding to similar problems that may also be occurring with the new school project. I would like to take the dialog further and question compulsory education as the source of the problem. Compulsory education was begun in Massachusetts it is believed prior to the Civil War. Before weighing in with comments on this subject it is asked that the reader do their homework by reading the book The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto. The first 27 installments can be found at Templeton Times for your reading pleasure. Homework Please do your homework so that an informed opinion can be valued by readers here at Paulys blog. It is suggested that the book be ordered and read thoroughly as the first 27 installments are but a snippet of the great information held in this treasure.
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ReplyDeletePuffy,
ReplyDeleteAdministrators can cook, do laundry, watch football AND remove your comments. You know the rules.
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DeletePuffy,
ReplyDeleteIt's not Jeff Bennett removing your comments
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
DeleteHow do you know that
DeleteHuff, I do not remove your comments, fact is I try to read them before they get removed. Also as you see, I have not gone away and I am not a cheerleader from Facebook. You should be asking the school how much for chips, what are special chips and how much is propane costing us?
ReplyDelete