The Morgan County Commissioners agreed on Monday to allocate $400,000 from the county’s American Rescue Plan Act funds to renovate the courthouse elevator.
The elevator has had intermittent operational malfunctions over the last several years. Kone-A Representative Jim Mies told the commissioners Monday that the elevator has become obsolete. The elevator, which was fabricated by the Long Elevator Company of Riverton, ceased operations approximately 15 years ago and its assets were purchased by Kone.
Mies says the issue now is that finding parts for any current operational Long Elevators still in use is becoming hard to come by: “So the issue that we have is the brain box that basically controls everything that’s upstairs in the attic [of the courthouse], there are certain components that we can’t get anymore. [Long] made their own elevators . They did their own software and they bought parts from certain companies that don’t exist anymore. We are running into the issue of now when something happens to the elevator…ooh…getting parts for repairing them are getting harder and harder to come by. So, our engineer brought that to the attention of the Morgan County Commissioners. They asked what their options were, and he responded by saying that the option would be to replace that controller.”
Mies says that with the exchange of the controller to the elevator comes with several updates to the elevator, the elevator shaft, and to the courthouse building itself because it requires the new elevator to be in compliance with a 2019 Illinois law.
Using a state bidding process called Omnia which is optimized by several government entities, primarily housing authorities, the county would use Kone-A’s bid and subcontractor process streamlining the process and the timeline.
Mies says the quicker the county can approve the contract, the quicker the project could start: “Upon getting an award, the engineer and I would come back to the courthouse and spend the better part of a full day with the elevator. We would go through and do all of our surveys. The engineering department at Kone gets our package and then, there is a back-and-forth period with those engineers because they always have questions until they get to the point where they have information where they can order the elevator. Conservatively, I’ll tell you that process takes about 2 months. Once everything is finalized on the technical review and the part are ordered, your lead time is roughly speaking about 4 months. That just means that everything is going to hit the distribution center, which is just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio – you’ve got to give it a week for it to ship and then the only other thing, I usually tell people to add a month for shipping and waiting for the next [installation] crew to be available. We have 4-5 crews that do these types of projects. Not everybody can do mods. You’ve got to kind of have a seasoned veteran guy that knows how to make old stuff work with the the new stuff. These projects are not a 3-day job. We have a current crew in Urbana right now at Carle Hospital. They are going to be there probably for 6 months.”
Mies says roughly speaking the work could take 2-6 months to install the renovated elevator, depending upon the amount of work that is needed to the building. He says if all goes well, the courthouse would be looking at being without an elevator for approximately 2 months.
Morgan County Commissioner Chair Mike Wankel said the elevator project would not start until after January 1st.
The commissioners approved the allocation of the ARPA funding unanimously and are expected to vote on the contract with Kone-A, Incorporated for the elevator project later this month.