BRUNSWICK — Brunswick town councilors on Tuesday voted unanimously to spend $300,000 to replace three 20-year-old town hall HVAC units that Town Manager John Eldridge said are “past end-of-life.” 

Eldridge told the council that two of the three units have had “some level of failure” over the years but that officials hoped to stretch them through to the end of the year.  After one completely failed in late August, leaving the first floor without air conditioning, waiting started to look far less feasible. 

According to Eldridge, in the colder months, the gas-fired units heat the entire building early in the morning, and then throughout the day, variable air volume (VAV) units heat the individual office spaces. The VAVs use electricity to warm the air that is then blown into the spaces being heated. They eat up a lot of electricity, he said, but due to cost limitations are likely to stay. 

Engineers reportedly told town officials that replacing the units with anything other than electric heat could be cost-prohibitive. For example, Eldridge said in a memo to the council, hot water units would require the installation of a boiler and extensive plumbing work, which a rough estimate in 2014 suggested would be “several hundred thousand dollars.” 

It would not be cost-effective to continue repairing the units.

“While we can continue to explore options, air conditioning alone would still require the replacement of the rooftop units,” he said, adding that they plan to replace them with similar, but newer units that would be more efficient and used more than the existing “all-or-nothing” units, he said. 

The project, considered an “emergency” under the town charter, will be funded by the unassigned general fund. 

The town acquired the town hall, then the McLellan Building, in a trade with Bowdoin College for the former Longfellow Elementary School in an agreement reached in 2011.

Town offices moved to the McLellan Building in early 2014, but the change was not without controversy surrounding the cost of renovations. 

Early estimates on the cost of rehabilitating the building were between $100,000 and $200,000 in 2011, a figure that before long had increased more than tenfold, landing at about $1.2 million.