Learn from Surfside, Kansas City. Fix crumbling City Hall garage, add fire sprinklers

While city leaders consider whether to repair or to rebuild the crumbling underground garage at Kansas City’s nearly 100-year old City Hall, workers inside the building ought to be concerned that 21 of the building’s 29 floors have no sprinkler system.

Learning about the lack of fire safety in the building clearly concerns Mayor Quinton Lucas, whose office is on the top floor.

“How did we get to the point where this building does not have fire suppression?” Lucas asked during a recent council committee meeting where the city architect discussed the condition of the building. “I just don’t feel right having workers in the building today without fire suppression on 21 floors.” City staff “should be banging on the city manager’s office door to address this core need.” Actually, they shouldn’t need to, especially after the recent condo collapse in Surfside, Florida, reminded us how tragic it can be to ignore safety concerns.

It’ll cost at least $15 million to fix those two problems. But as painful as that expense will be, it will be not just money well spent but money necessarily spent. No one wants to look back and say yeah, guess we should have taken fire safety or structural integrity issues more seriously.

City Hall is the city’s house, and as with any house, it hurts to spend a bunch on unexpected repairs and safety issues. But you have to do it anyway. Deferred maintenance always costs more in the long run. And what the city definitely can’t afford is a fire in the building or the collapse of the garage under the south plaza.

City officials have known for years about the deterioration of concrete in the garage; constant leaks and falling pieces of rock were pretty good indications. The downtown Barney Allis Plaza and garage were at risk of collapsing, too, before the city moved in March to rebuild them.

A 2018 structural engineering inspection of the City Hall garage identified “widespread concrete deterioration in the form of chloride induced corrosion.” The culprit? All the many years of winter salting seeping through the ground above the garage and rotting away the concrete below.

Until the tragic building collapse in Florida last month — 98 people were killed — Kansas City officials were thinking maybe they’d get around to fixing it at some point.

But after the Surfside fiasco — suspected to have been caused by corrosion of load-bearing concrete in an enclosed garage attached to the building — City Hall’s garage problem became more of a concern.

Staff has proposed a resolution, which the City Council should approve next week, that the structural integrity of City Hall and various other city-owned structures be reviewed and repairs prioritized. Similarly, leaders in other cities, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Jersey City, New Jersey, are taking a closer look at their structures, wondering whether a crisis might be looming.

Since Kansas City’s rickety garage is located under City Hall’s south entrance — where the Lincoln statue stands — that area has been fenced off from foot traffic.

Fountains on the lawn have been drained to alleviate weight on the garage ceiling.

The city has a few options. It could spend $5 million to do some waterproofing and extend the life of the garage some 25 years. It could spend $17 million on work that would include replacing the main stairs to City Hall. Or, it could spend nearly $40 million to rebuild the whole garage.

Even if City Hall doesn’t really need that garage, since employees have other parking just across the street, doing nothing is not an option. Corrosion and crumbling won’t repair itself, and the public plaza above won’t be safe.

As for the sprinklers, Lucas is right to be uncomfortable. Not having a building-wide sprinkler system would be code violation in a younger structure. When City Hall was built in 1937 sprinkler systems didn’t exist, said Deputy Chief James Dean, the city’s fire marshal. But the current situation isn’t safe.

As it is, Dean said that something as simple as “a coffee pot left on overnight could ignite a fire. A sprinkler would shut that down right away.” No sprinklers presents “a life and safety issue.”

Before the pandemic, 600 people worked in that building every day.

The price of the peace of mind that sprinklers would provide would run about $10.5 million out of a $1.5 billion budget. But the alternative is too irresponsible to consider.