WALLACE — This should be the last sweltering summer experienced by the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO), as plans have been made to have a new closed-loop chiller system installed before temperatures rise again.

Sheriff Mike Gunderson with SCSO met with the Shoshone Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), Shoshone County Maintenance Director Max Dugger, and Gary Roylance from Control Solutions Northwest Inc. to discuss a time and strategy to install the new chillers.

One option discussed was to install the chiller behind SCSO; however, Sheriff Gunderson had his concerns.

“There are several reasons why I’m in favor of putting the system up on the roof,” said Gunderson to the room. “Unfortunately, most people don’t realize that when we access the basement, we already have a large generator on one side. We would block the view of people backing out of the basement. When people are backing out, they couldn’t see cars coming through the alleyway. We looked at several options, and the sally port roof came up.”

The sally port, a secure, controlled entry, is on the west side of the building, closer to where the actual plumbing would be.

A couple of hiccups come with putting it on the roof. The chiller is around 800 pounds, so a structural engineer needs to inspect the roof and make sure it is structurally sound for that weight. Then, if approved, a second hiccup would be how and when they would get it on the roof.

“The road can’t be blocked off, as it’s the I-90 Business route. Even though I-90 goes over the town, they can’t block off the business route. So we will have to utilize the side or the back alleyway. It’s just going to take some planning,” Gunderson said.

In April, a survey of SCSO was conducted by Roylance, and reported various issues with the heating and cooling system at SCSO to be investigated and eventually fixed.

Previous reports have shown that SCSO has been so hot that chocolate and cheese have melted atop the desks. On the other end of the spectrum, there have been additional weeks with no heat. The current system is an older pneumatic system, which only has a handful of local techs that can work on it and is very outdated.

“This system has a lot of complications. The control system is over 20 years old. They don’t even have computers that can run it,” Gunderson explained at a previous meeting.

Another issue with the current system is that it goes through massive amounts of water which is expensive and wasteful.

In 2019, Gunderson proposed a $22,444,685 bond that would have paid for constructing a modern public safety building in Wallace. Unfortunately, taxpayers did not approve that bond; therefore, Gunderson and the BOCC have had to work to upgrade and maintain the aging facility.

The BOCC, SCSO and Roylance are awaiting the approval of a structural engineer to determine whether the sally port roof can structurally hold the chiller to decide the steps in the future.