Source: Jonathon Wheeler, Watertown Daily Times, N.Y. Fri, April 17, 2026 at 10:59 PM CDT
WATERTOWN — When residents in the Watertown City School District go to the ballot May 19 to vote on the school budget and Board of Education members, they will also be asked to voice their opinion on a proposition.
Titled “Empowering our Future,” the proposition is for an Energy Performance Contract for $5.3 million with no impact on the tax levy.
The district is looking to contract with Day Automation, which did an electrical audit throughout the district to see where it can save energy.
“What we found was a lot of control systems in our district are very old and a lot of our lighting fixtures are not LED,” Superintendent of Schools Larry C. Schmiegel said.
Schmiegel said this school year Gov. Kathleen C. Hochul enacted legislation which mandates that if a classroom gets above 88 degrees, then the students must be moved to an alternate location, went into effect. He said the only school with central air or air conditioning is H.T. Wiley Intermediate School.
“These control systems will not add AC, but they’ll allow us to monitor energy,” he said. “When you’re looking at different air vents and things, there may be certain times of the day or night that we can open them to kind of draw heat out or push cold air in to help monitor the temperature and mitigate the heat potentiality during the day.”
Schmiegel said some of the controls and lighting were added into the recently passed $110 million capital improvement project, but not in every building and not every space of every building.
“This is something we’re looking at doing district-wide,” he said. Schmiegel said the projected savings in energy costs over 18 years are $3.2 million.
The contract also has an insurance portion of it where if the district saves less than the $3.2 million, then Day Automation will pay the difference, Schmiegel said.
By putting it on the ballot,instead of just unilaterally deciding to do the project, if it gets passed, the district will get 10% more in state aid for the project, which is approximately $725,000.
Schmiegel said that if they are able to pull some of the aspects out of the $110 million capital project and do them instead with this project, then there are other things that can get done in the $110 million capital project.
If the project gets voted down, the district could still move forward with the project, but they would not receive the extra 10% in state aid.
“What we’re trying to do is maximize all the things that are going on,” Schmiegel said. “We need to maximize, just like we would in our own personal homes; we want to maximize every dollar we possibly can so that the burden does not go on the taxpayers.” Schmiegel said that the district’s February utilities bill was $106,000.
“If we can get new infrastructure and HVAC systems in these buildings, and we can cut that bill in half, the taxpayers benefit from those efforts,” he said.
The vote on the budget, school board candidates, and this proposition will be held from noon to 9 p.m. May 19 at North Elementary School and Watertown High School.
