The Tamaqua Area School Board on Tuesday heard a proposal to save the district more than $2 million in energy costs over the next 20 years while undertaking multiple infrastructure improvements.

The McClure Company presented a plan to move ahead with nearly $3 million needed improvements, such as boiler and chiller upgrades at the middle school, this year and reap guaranteed savings under Act 163.

Superintendent Ray Kinder said the district has worked with the Harrisburg-based firm in the past on its geothermal project and HVAC work at the high school.

“One of our thoughts was we have some major issues in our buildings with boilers and things like that, and we were planning to come forward with some projects,” he said.

“They asked us to look at the ESCO side of it in order to possibly do some things to save some funds,” Kinder told the board.

Don Marangoni from McClure pointed out that the company has done over $10 million worth of work with the district in the past and provided over $8 million in savings over 20 years.

Among the larger items for the district are middle school boiler and chiller upgrades and replacing the high school pool unit, he said.

“Along with each item, there’s the investment cost, and then the savings that are over 20 years,” Marangoni said. “That’s not the annual savings; that’s the savings over 20 years.”

This project will be looking at the following upgrades, costs and energy savings. The middle school boiler upgrade is expected to cost $413,006, and reap $37,569 in savings; the middle school chiller upgrade, $771,198/costs and $24,112/saving; middle school LED lighting retrofit, $514,497/costs and $613,941/savings; high school pool unit upgrade, $527,180/costs and $1,594/savings; high school lighting retrofit, $320,582/costs and $553,067/savings; Tamaqua Elementary LED lighting retrofit, $249,800/costs and $676,378/savings, and West Penn Elementary LED lighting retrofit, $142,292/costs and $172,254/savings.

The project would also look at adding a middle school domestic water filtration system, which would cost $37,663, Marangoni said.

Kinder asked if there was any way to control how hot the pool area is, and Marangoni said that dehumidification is going to help with that.

Board President Larry Wittig said that projected energy savings were great overall, but pointed out that the pool savings were only $79 a year. Marangoni agreed that there wasn’t a lot of savings there, as there were in other areas such as lighting.

The district has undertaken other projects such as solar, and the projected saving estimates didn’t come through, Wittig said.

“The point I’m trying to make is to justify spending $3 million to save $2 million over 20 years is not an incentive, because that $2 million for me could be zero,” he said.

“From my perspective, we do it, because we should do it. It’s prudent to do it.”

The board finance committee did advance advertising for proposals or quotes on the project to next week’s board meeting. If the board moves ahead, the project could get started this summer.