Bartholomew County needs to replace an elevator in the county’s Emergency Operations 911 Center at 131 S. Cherry St., and has decided to completely modernize the unit.
Bartholomew County Maintenance Supervisor Rick Trimpe said it wasn’t simply a mechanical part in the elevator that broke down. The problem was that “a computer in a control board blew up,” Trimpe said.
Initially, the county was hopeful they could simply replace the control board, but since the entire unit is 25 years old, replacement parts are no longer being made, Trimpe said.
So he said a decision was made to completely modernize the unit. The county received only one bid to do the work: TK Elevator, a global corporation with a branch office in Indianapolis, provided a bid of $86,549 to do the necessary work.
With proper regular maintenance, modern elevators should last 25 to 30 years, according to the U.S. Asset Services website.
Other buildings in the county have also needed new elevators in recent years.
TK Elevator was known as Thyssenkrupp Elevator when they were hired to install a replacement at the Bartholomew County Courthouse during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak.
Completed in March, 2020, local taxpayers paid $109,975 to have the modern elevator installed in the nearly 150-year-old building.
It would be easy to assume that everything is up to date in the Bartholomew County Governmental Office building. After all, the building underwent its most extensive renovation in 40 years from late 2019 to 2020.
But at a recent meeting, Bartholomew County commissioner Larry Kleinhenz noted how strange it was to have so many elevators in public buildings break down over a relatively short period of time.
That prompted Kleinhenz’s fellow commissioner,Carl Lienhoop, to announced the two elevators in the governmental office building are due to be replaced relatively soon.
The cost is anticipated to be three-and-a-half times higher than what the work at the Emergency Operations Center cost, Lienhoop said.
No timetable for this latest project has been announced.
