Faced with the costly replacement of air conditioning equipment at the American Legion’s national headquarters facility, Bill Sweeney, Executive Director of the Indiana War Memorial, knew Citizens Thermal could provide an outstanding cooling solution yielding significant long-term savings.

Sweeney manages the facility needs of the Indiana War Memorial Building, which towers over Michigan and Meridian Streets, and the adjoining American Legion National Headquarters and Indiana American Legion Headquarters, located to the north. He also manages the facility needs of the Soldiers & Sailors Monument on the Circle Downtown. The State of Indiana owns and manages the memorials and leases buildings to the American Legion.

During the late 1990s, Citizens Thermal began providing steam and chilled water to the Indiana War Memorial and steam only to the Legion facilities and the Soldiers & Sailors Monument. “Prior to that time, the War Memorial was heated with boilers and cooled with window air conditioning units. This resulted in pretty uneven heating and cooling throughout the facility. Converting to steam and chilled water for heating and cooling the War Memorial has proven to be a great decision and convinced us the chilled water expansion made sense for the Legion facilities,” Sweeney said.

Bill Sweeney
Executive Director of
The Indiana War Memorial

Citizens Thermal recently completed a chilled water system expansion that will provide central cooling to the American Legion facilities and to the expanded Central Library located to the north of the Legion facilities. “We were able to come to a mutually beneficial agreement with Citizens that helped us obtain chilled water for the Legion facilities, while facilitating the easement expansion Citizens needed to grow its system further north,” Sweeney explained.

Using Citizens Thermal for its heating and cooling needs will help the War Memorial and Legion facilities achieve long-term savings, which result largely from reduced costs for capital equipment and maintenance. “Not having to replace and maintain heating and cooling equipment provides significant savings to the facilities over the next 20 years,” Sweeney said.

These savings are especially important for the operating and maintenance budgets of the various facilities. “During good economic times the state is able to fund capital improvements, but it’s often more difficult to get capital improvements funded during difficult economic times, like those we’ve seen recently. Having central heating and cooling from Citizens Thermal helps us focus our capital improvement budget requests on other priorities such as the new air handling and electrical upgrades we will be installing at the Legion facilities this summer. In fact, the chilled water expansion helped us avoid having to spend about $400,000 to replace the old central cooling units at the Legion facilities,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney knows maintaining a comfortable environment is important for memorial visitors and the treasured memories they come to view. “Having a centralized source of steam and chilled water has enabled us to achieve a more comfortable and consistent environment throughout the memorials and the American Legion facilities. This benefits not only our employees and visitors, but it helps us preserve the many sensitive documents, military uniforms and other materials on display at the memorials.”

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