AUGUSTA — The new O’Connor Chevy, Buick, GMC and Cadillac dealership building that opened Monday taps deep into the earth for its heat and cooling.
So while the 700 cars and trucks for sale at the new Riverside Drive lot need to have oil inside them to function, the new $3 million building where they will be sold does not.
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Instead of oil, the new dealership will be both heated and cooled by a geothermal system based on 18 wells drilled to a depth of 360 feet below the car and truck-covered new dealership lot.
The geothermal climate control system, one of several unique aspects of the new building, uses heat and circulator pumps to consolidate heat from groundwater in the deep wells and circulate it throughout the building through radiant floor tubing and traditional ductwork. In cooling mode, the system transfers heat from the building into the groundwater.
Randy Hutchins, owner of O’Connor Auto Group, said the system, installed by ABM Mechanical of Bangor, cost about twice as much money to install as a conventional oil heating system, which is what he had originally planned.
However, Hutchins spoke with ABM officials and had his accountant look at the tax incentives for installing geothermal systems.
“My accountant called back, after looking at the numbers, and said this is no decision — you have to do this,” Hutchins said.
Hutchins said he had previously estimated heating the new building with oil would cost about $33,000 a year, based on a price of $3.50 per gallon of oil. The geothermal system is expected to heat the same amount of space for about $11,000 a year.
Hutchins said the new lot consolidates all four General Motors franchises under one roof, the only such arrangement in New England.
Generally, GM wants each of its brands to have its own dedicated lot, but it made an exception for O’Connor. That exception was based in part, O’Connor officials said, on the firm’s large sales volume.
The company has been in business for 62 years. Hutchins bought it from the O’Connor family in 2005.
One end of the new building features a large heated garage bay, where customers can drop off their cars for service, which will be done at O’Connor’s other, older locations nearby on Riverside Drive. The other end of the building has a three-bay garage where customers will pick up, and learn about the features of, the vehicle they buy.
“This was three years in the making, so this is a very exciting day for us all,” Hutchins said of the building. “It will be a totally new experience for our customers. It was time.”
Permit application documents filed with the city Planning Board indicate it was a $3 million project, including $2.1 million for the building and $700,000 for site construction and ledge removal.
Peter Thompson, executive director of the Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce, said the sparkling new building is impressive and helps bring a new level of quality to one of the city’s prominent gateways, the outlet of Route 3.
“It’s huge for the area,” Thompson said. “It has opened up a new level of value for this gateway to Augusta. This is a truly modern facility, about as modern as I’ve ever seen.”
The building includes a directional paging system used to contact salesmen on the lot and other workers via speakers. The system was modified to make it a directional system capable of only broadcasting to specific areas, as opposed to a more traditional system that broadcasts each message throughout the property.
While the new site it was being built, neighbors of other O’Connor lots were among a group of residents who complained about noise coming from speakers on car lots. Some said they could hear speakers from O’Connor’s other Riverside Drive lots on the other side of the Kennebec River.
Hutchins said the new lot’s speakers won’t bother its neighbors.
In granting the permit, city officials noted the dealership does not have any abutting residential neighbors.
O’Connor will keep its older lots, but convert them to new uses, including its original Riverside Drive site where it has sold GM trucks for decades. The original sales building is now the parts and service department.In advance of Monday’s opening over the weekend, the freshly paved sales lot needed one final thing: its inventory of cars. All 700 of them.
Hutchins said a crew of about 50 workers came in Sunday to move cars over from other lots to the new site, coordinated by three people to make sure all the vehicles ended up in the right spots.
Keith Edwards — 621-5647
kedwards@centralmaine.com
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