Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Energy Grant OK'd For City

Gurdon's City Hall will soon be a much cooler place.

State Rep. Percy Malone and Gurdon Mayor Rick Smith met Friday, June 21, at the state capitol before a hearing of the Arkansas Energy Committee.

The end result was Gurdon receiving a grant for $29,604 to purchase new air conditioning units for city hall, finish out the fire department bays and make other energy conserving improvements to the city's municipal building.

"Our current heating and cooling units," Smith said, "are almost 20 years old, and due to advancements in energy conserving measures in the past decade are very inefficient by today's standards.

"Our problem at City Hall is actually two-fold. We're not only faced with unnecessarily high utility bills due to the inefficiency of the existing units, but have been spending excessive amounts of money trying to patch those units just to get by. One of these units is beyond repair."

Smith and Malone have been working on this problem for several months. Malone, who is on the state's energy committee, got the ball rolling so Gurdon could get the grant and replace the worn out air conditioning units.

"I want to extend my sincere thanks, and know that I'm speaking for the entire City, to Malone and the Energy Committee for this grant," Smith said. "We were between a rock and a hard place concerning our heating and cooling situation at City Hall."

The city will be receiving the grant funding in 30 to 60 days, but, according to Smith, hopes to begin the project as soon as possible.