Crews are working this week at Lexington City Hall to repair damage following a recent sewer line break above the first floor ceiling.
Visitors will have to make their way around a sizeable amount of scaffolding that currently takes up much of the lobby area.
Director of Facilities and Fleet Management Jamshid Baradaran says it's no surprise that the aging building has structural issues. "The building is fairly old. A lot of the infrastructure within the building is original to the building. So, it's about the age now, even with the steel pipes or galvanized or so forth, it's gonna start giving us some issues," said Baradaran.
Baradaran says city officials have been proactive in tackling the building's maintenance issues. He says the broken sewer line caused no significant damage. The cost of repairing the line is approximately $60,000.
Council member Bill Farmer believes the work site may reignite discussion about constructing a new city hall building. Farmer says a new structure would be less expensive in the long run. "If we made the move we could decide to build a building that could be more useable than this one is and use it more effectively and hopefully save money over the long haul, because your maintenance costs would go way down and your opportunity to make it most useful would go way up,” said Farmer. “That is not an alive discussion, but the scaffolding could make it so."
Farmer says the location of a potential new city hall building has apparently helped to stall previous discussions on the issue.
