After months of deliberating on plans to reduce Effingham County’s energy use, the Effingham County Board is moving forward with a window replacement project.
During the its meeting Monday, the board awarded a bid to Superior Window Company in the amount of $196,421 for the replacement of the majority of the windows in the Effingham County Office Building.
The board has been looking to pull the trigger on the project for several months now. The scope of the energy savings project used to include the installation of a solar system on the roof of the Effingham County Office Building, which would have brought the total project cost to about $600,000. But the board abandoned the solar portion of the project in March.
“I just want to thank the committee for revisiting the windows again. That saved the county a lot of dollars,” Effingham County Board Vice Chair Dave Campbell said regarding the Effingham County Building and Grounds Committee.
The county received two bids for the project, with the lowest coming from the Centralia based Superior Window Company and the other coming from Dan’s Glass Inc., which is based in Effingham. The price of the bid from Superior Window Company was about $79,000 less than that of Dan’s Glass Inc.
“The bids were pretty consistent with each other,” Effingham County Board member Tim Ellis said. “Superior did have a few other things in their bid, such as insulation and sealing and things like that behind the brick once the old windows come out.”
Effingham County Board Chair Josh Douthit noted that the price of the bid awarded to Superior Window Company is more than $100,000 less than the anticipated cost of the window replacement project.
“Again, we were around that $330,000 mark with the previous plan, so I do think we’ve saved our tax payers a significant amount of money by doing this project on its own,” Douthit said. “I appreciate everyone’s hard work and diligence on that.”
The final scope of the project includes the replacement of all windows on the second, third and fourth floor of the building. The board hopes that replacing these windows will reduce the amount of energy used by the county.
“I appreciated everyone’s patience on that,” Ellis said. “I know we kind of went around the bushes to get to where we got, but I think we got to the right spot of what we needed. And we did the right thing.”
Effingham County Board member Elizabeth Huston was absent.