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Ericson Seeking Re-election to Lanesborough Board of Selectmen
By Andy McKeever, iBerkshires Staff
03:46AM / Monday, June 13, 2016
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Robert Ericson says he wants to finish the projects he began three years ago.

LANESBOROUGH, Mass. — Robert Ericson hopes to finish up some of the projects he started three years ago when first elected to the Board of Selectmen.
 
The 74-year-old retired engineer is up for re-election to the board and is being challenged by Michelle Johnson.
 
Ericson says he is right in the midst of improving energy efficiency in town buildings, and is serving on the Mount Greylock School Building Committee, playing a role in helping save money on construction. He envisions this could be his last term and he hopes to finish what he started.
 
"I haven't been able to get the stuff done that I expected to get done in the first three years. It takes forever to get things done," Ericson said. 
 
He also headed the town's effort to become designated a Green Community, which meant some $135,000 in state funding for efficiency projects. So far, Ericson and the Green Committee have performed assessments on all town buildings and are slowly working through projects.
 
"We've done a lot up at the [Lanesborough] School because that is the biggest energy user and we are dropping the numbers there. Next year, I should have some really good numbers to show how much it has dropped. But this year, it is probably down 10 percent," Ericson said. "We replaced all of the lights with LEDs, replaced pole lamps out front, the pole lamps used to be on all night long and aren't on all night anymore. It was kind of a waste."
 
He also discovered the 400-gallon water heater at the school was running all the time, and got school officials to turn it off when it isn't needed. Further, he helped put in a detector to run the air exchange in the gymnasium, which was running at full capacity at all times.
 
"We made it based on occupancy sensors. It detects the the CO2 levels and then activates the air exchange based on that. If you have two people in there, it doesn't do very much. If you have a town meeting going on then it will be going," Ericson said.
 
He's also known for doing a survey and turning off a number of street lights, cutting down on electrical usage. The next building on the radar is the Police Station, which Ericson says has the highest energy costs per square foot. He said the walls have no insulation and the construction siphons air through the attic and down into the walls. The fix is to block off the air access points at the top and add insulation.
 
A similar issue was found at Town Hall and when a new roof was placed on the rear portion, Ericson was able to convince the town to pay a little extra to double the insulation depth. The rest of Town Hall is also lacking insulation and again, some of the insulation placed in portions of the building had fallen down through the walls, creating a geothermic heat pump sending cold air down to be warmed by the town's heating system only to float right back out.
 
"We need to insulate the walls. The windows are drafty and very inefficient. You can feel the wind whistling through," Ericson said.
 
Meanwhile, he is digging deep into the design work for the new high school on the Mount Greylock School Building Committee to find efficiencies — a task he says sometimes makes him feel like he is tilting at windmills because the rest of the committee isn't always on board. Ericson said while working at General Dynamics, he headed eight separate building projects.
 
"I seem to be the only one digging and reviewing. I bet I am the only one on the committee that read the specification book. I read the whole thing," Ericson said. 
 
But he is finding areas for improvement. He said one iteration of the plan called for one hot water heater that would then run water through some half mile of piping to the rest of the buildings, clearly not an efficient way to design it.
 
Ericson was the only member of the Board of Selectmen in favor of the $65 million high school project. His reasoning stems from his work on the Building Committee after the locker room ceiling collapsed. He had been on the committee since 2006 when the concept of building or renovating the high school was first being considered. But the ceiling collapse and emergency repairs delayed the process.
 
Ericson spent the next two years as the construction manager for the repair project. At the same time, he got a close look at the rest of the building.
 
"After spending months looking at drawings and poking around in the building, I came to the conclusion that I would keep the boiler room, the auditorium, and the gym and I would get rid of the rest of it. As I saw it, there was no way to make such an inefficiently constructed building — oil was 9 cents a gallon when they built that place, it was a totally different scenario and they built it the way they built schools in those days with massive construction and no concern about insulation," Ericson said.
 
"By the time you did the sums of all of the costs, we would have to fix this huge inefficient, spread out building and at the end of it you would still have an inefficient spread out building."
 
It's been the most hotly debated project in recent history; bonding authorization passed by 134 votes earlier this year.  While Ericson has been supportive, he does believe there could have been a smaller scaled project. Nonetheless, he feels the new construction is a better investment than renovating the old school.
 
"Whether we fixed the old school at an estimated $54 million or we built a new school at an estimate of $64 million, the impact to the town the difference is only about $15,000 a year because of the reimbursement rates," Ericson said. "For the old school renovation you had a lower reimbursement rate."
 
Moving forward, Ericson says the town needs to be careful with its spending to offset the project that will bump the town close to or having the highest tax rate in the county. 
 
"It almost seems like why bother with the energy things now? But in reality, instead of the why bother attitude it should be we need to make our buildings as efficient as we can because that is not a one-time savings. That is a savings every year," Ericson said.
 
One concept Ericson has is to bring on an ombudsman to work with businesses and town committees to find a path forward. Recently the Olde Forge Restaurant had been looking to use the building it owns next to the restaurant to expand its catering business. But the proposal was withdrawn. Ericson said the town committees picked the project apart so much and tried to regulate it too much.
 
"We killed it. Our town committees beat him into oblivion and did not help the project," Ericson said. "That was using existing property. It's not like he was going out and cutting down a forest."
 
When it comes to the Berkshire Mall, Ericson said there isn't much the town can do — it is all up to the owners. However, he cited the mall in Colonie, N.Y., as one that was on the ropes but managed to turn things around.
 
"That whole mall now is bustling. Somebody turned that thing around. Somebody put the effort into figuring it out, making deals with businesses to come in, got them in and got the traffic started again. Now it is going great. That's what we need here," Ericson said.
 
The election is scheduled for June 21.
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