President's Message - February 2003

Norman Salisbury
President

I want to take a few minutes and bring you up to date on the work being done on the air conditioning and the progress we have made. For the past several months, our consulting engineer, John Frank, has been testing and diagnosing our cooling towers, pumps and chillers.

At first, it simply appeared that larger pumps might be able to deliver an adequate supply of water from the cooling tower to our chillers, but when the pressures and flows failed to live up to the calculated requirement, further testing was required. The results of these studies indicate that our cooling tower is undersize for our chillers and the cooling tower piping, while of marginal size, has also experience substantial scaling and deterioration- further reducing its effectiveness.

The chillers seem to be of adequate size, but the inadequacies of our cooling tower and piping do not allow us to make full use of them and when we make the attempt, they overload and shut down. The chillers are nearing the end of the useful economic lives. Newer models of similar capacity are nearly twice as efficient in energy consumption.

This is our current situation and the Board is presently evaluating several alternatives. One involves fairly minimal replacements that will get us by until we replace the chillers. Another is a fairly complete renovation and replacement of the entire system and will require substantial funding.

We are also investing funding options such as energy efficiency grants and loans from Pacificorp similar to those we obtained several years ago when we retrofitted all of our internal lighting.

While a special assessment is not being considered at all, we believe that the complete overhaul could be accomplished with loans and a reasonable increase in the Common Reserve assessments for a period of time.

While we understand the urgency to complete repairs before the heat waves of summer hot, we do in fact want to make the repairs correctly and in a manner that will provide the most efficient long-term benefit to our homes and property values.

Please attend the Board of Trustees meetings for the current status. We sincerely appreciate and solicit your input in making these decisions.

Sincerely,