City Council approves repairs to water tank  

The Long Beach City Council on Tuesday voted 3-2 to repair the city’s elevated water storage tank, with council members Len Torres and Mike Fagen giving the resolution a thumbs-down.

The repairs to the tower, which is located on Park Place at Riverside Boulevard and whose tank holds up to 75,000 gallons of water, will include the replacement of clevis attachments, windage rods and turnbuckles as well as restoration of the site.

City Manage Charles Theofan said that very few companies on the East Coast do these kinds of repairs, and that only two companies bid for the contract. Manolis Painting, a Baltimore-based company, was awarded the project, which will cost $367,536.

The city will use $350,000 from a $6 million bond it passed in December, and the remaining $17,000 will be paid for out of an account for construction projects.

At Tuesday’s council meeting, Theofan explained that the tank has been deteriorating for years and is “seriously compromised,” and that without the repairs, the structure could fail. “Unfortunately, we hope to replace this tank in the not-too-distant future, but at present we need to make repairs because of questions of structural integrity,” he said.

Council President Thomas Sofield expressed concern about spending money to repair the tank and then having to replace it in the near future. “I don’t want to rebuild the engine on my car and then, six months later, buy a new car,” Sofield said, calling on Theofan and Kevin Mulligan, the city’s commissioner of public works, to commit to pursuing other means to fund the replacement of the tower.

Theofan said that he could not put a date on when the tower would be replaced, but he indicated that U.S. Rep. Peter King is working on obtaining funding that would cover most of the project’s costs.

When Fagen asked Mulligan about the life expectancy of the tower if the city skips the repairs, Mulligan said, “We need to move ahead with replacing these structural supports. Putting a time frame on what is the life of the tank —- both [of the city’s water] tanks probably should have been replaced 20 years ago … We’re continually maintaining the tanks, which is necessary.”

Fagen stressed that the city should know how many more years the tanks can last before they have to be replaced.

Theofan said that the tower structure could hold the tank for years to come, but he suggested that it might not remain standing in a Category 2 hurricane. “You wouldn’t want to park your car under it,” he said. “There is a statistical chance that it could fail, and that’s obviously a chance we can’t take.”

Theofan said that in 2002, the City Council passed a $1.5 million bond to replace the water tank, but transferred that money to the city’s general fund.

Mulligan said that he expected the repairs to the tower would take 120 days to complete.

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