Macon gets some money to update facilities

The city of Macon has won a nearly $950,000 federal stimulus grant to upgrade the roof at City Hall, replace the heating and cooling system at the City Auditorium and make other changes meant to save energy.


The grant, from the U.S. Department of Energy, totals $946,600 and doesn’t require any matching money from the city, according to summary documents. The full council is expected to vote tonight to accept the money, and the grant easily cleared the council’s Appropriations Committee on Monday.

City grant documents lay out how the money would be spent, including:

$515,212 to retrofit the City Auditorium’s heating and cooling system. The current system is outdated and operates “inefficiently,” the city said in its grant proposal. The change should save more than 900,000 kilowatt hours of energy a year, about 700 tons of carbon dioxide emissions and more than $56,000 a year, the city said.

$265,037 to retrofit the roofs at City Hall and the police department’s detective bureau next door. The roofs will be more energy efficient, saving hundreds of thousands of kilowatts of power, hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide emissions and about $18,700 a year in power costs, according to the city’s grant proposal.

$53,050 to continue funding the city’s small-scale single-stream recycling program. While paper can be recycled curbside throughout the city, only about 1,100 homes are part of a single-stream pilot program to recycle many types of materials. That program had been funded by a state grant, which is running out, so the federal money would keep it going.

$20,962 to replace traffic lights with more energy-efficient ones.
$20,331 to install more energy efficient lights at the City Hall annex downtown.
$22,008 to retrofit three city vehicles so they can be run on propane at lower speeds, reducing their greenhouse emissions.
Contracts to do this work will have to be put out to bid, City Attorney Pope Langstaff said Monday.