Town hopes to save on energy costs

POLAND — The town is ready to stop heating the town hall building for its small recreation department.

“The little brick building, known as the Androscoggin Sheriff's Office is being renovated and the renovations are due to be completed at the end of this month,” said Town Manager Dana Lee. “Then ,we will move our recreation department into the back part [of the] sheriff’s building.

Lee says that the move will save the town money.

“The idea is to save a lot in the way of oil and energy from the great big town hall,” Lee continued, “which right now we have to keep warm all the time for one and a half people. We hope to regulate the town hall’s energy and save a bunch in oil.”

In other town business, the town office computer needs to be replaced immediately, Lee said.

“As of late it is not doing nightly backups of our data,” he said. “I told the board that this was an emergency situation. The server is seven years old; it only has one GB of memory and is completely out of memory. It’s old, it’s spent and we need to buy a new server and that will cost approximately $8,000 to $9,000. We have a $21,000 contingency fund that we’ve built up over the last three years and selectmen authorized to pay for the server from the contingency fund and to quickly and immediately try to get a new town server in here before anything fatal happens.”

Lee also reported on the future of the Adams Bridge on Lane Road.

“For the last two years, plus this budget year, we’ve been reserving money to rebuild that bridge and the board and I decided that we would put out a Request For Proposal (RFP) for engineering for the bridge’s reconstruction,” he said. “We are looking for an engineer to design the least [expensive], and the best, option for replacing that bridge. We want to complete the project this construction season.”