A sign hangs outside the Keene Town Hall in September 2019. (Enterprise photo — Elizabeth Izzo)

KEENE — The Keene Town Hall and court will reopen on Monday after a brief closure to remediate mold in the building.

The town hall and town court, located in the same building at 10892 state Route 9N, temporarily closed in late July after town employees discovered that mold had settled in the building’s forced air heating system and spread throughout the building as air flowed out.

Town Supervisor Joe Pete Wilson, Jr. on Friday said an engineer had just completed an inspection of the building to see how the cleanup went, and they gave the town hall the green light to reopen after finding the building to be mold-free.

Wilson said the town is moving as fast as it can to replace the forced air heating system before the cold weather hits in the next few months. He said he’d like to replace the building’s furnace and put in a heat pump, which would have heating, cooling and dehumidifying functions. In the meantime, he said, the town is making some changes to heating and air handling to get better ventilation throughout the building.

Wilson said that the remediation process cost the town around $6,000 from start to finish. He said town employees did a lot of prep work before the remediation crews came by moving out desks and filing cabinets, throwing old things away and ripping out old carpet to expose places in the town hall that had been long-covered.

“It was a good excuse to do some house cleaning,” he said.

After the prep was done, Wilson said the remediation process only took a couple of days.

Wilson doesn’t think the town will replace the old carpeting. Remediation crews and consultants advised that it’d be better to leave the floors bare since carpet can trap moisture and be harder to maintain. Wilson said that ripping out the carpet revealed nice hardwood floors underneath.