$850k for Millers Acre repairs
A council building infected with mould could require up to $850,000 to fix.
At a meeting yesterday, the Nelson City Council agreed in principle to approve a budget of $850,000 to replace cladding, if needed, to the affected Millers Acre Centre on Trafalgar St.
Parts of the building, owned by the Nelson City Council, were closed in May for urgent repair after four locations in the building tested positive for the presence of Stachybotrys chartarum, a potentially toxic black mould.
These included iSite, Datacom and Simply New Zealand and the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise office.
A report revealed the damage had occurred after cracks in the cladding of the building, on the corner of Trafalgar and Halifax streets, had allowed moisture to seep inside and cause damage needing ‘‘substantial cladding repairs’’.
During the level 3 lockdown, work was done to remediate, disinfect and remove the mould in the building.
At the meeting, councillor Gaile Noonan questioned why the bill for the repairs came from ratepayer funding rather than insurance.
Council chief executive Pat Dougherty said because cracking in the exterior cladding was not an unusual phenomenon, it would be classed as regular wear and tear.
Dougherty said that although the bill would not have been as high, had repair work been carried out earlier, there would still have been hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of planned maintenance scheduled for the building.
‘‘What I’m interested in is how did we leave it so long that we had leaks inside the building? ... We should have carried out some maintenance on that building five or six years ago,’’ he said.
Despite regular annual maintenance of the building’s exterior, cracks and leaks were not detected for the eight years from the building’s construction and code of compliance certification in 2006 until 2014.
Leaks were first reported by tenants in 2014, shortly after a condition assessment that found no significant issues.
Along with the budget for repairs, the recommendation also included a request for an external expert to investigate and advise on the cause of the issues, and to report back on how to avoid similar problems in the future.
Dougherty said Millers Acre had been constructed in 2004 at the tail end of the leaky building crisis, and may have different faults compared with buildings such as the Stoke Library.