Following my story on the downtown library spending, I heard from some readers wondering why the city paid Padres chairman John Moores’ development company to extend pipes providing chilled water to the library site.
Chilled water is used to cool air inside buildings. Darren Greenhalgh, a deputy director in the city’s Engineering and Capital Projects Department, told me that instead of building a separate chiller plant for the library, city officials determined it would be less costly to buy chilled water from Moores’ company, which has a chiller plant that services facilities in the East Village, including Moores’ developments.