Not even Fido could LOVE THESE HYDRANTS
City homeowners are unhappy with the ugly state of Woonsocket’s fire hydrants
WOONSOCKET – It’s no wonder so many people want the city to repaint the fire hydrants in front of their houses – they look like crusty old relics from a shipwreck.
“Some of them haven’t been repainted for a decade, maybe more,” says Public Works Director Steve D’Agostino. “Some of them are 80 years old. They’re deteriorating.”
And oh, that salmon-like shade of pinkish-orange paint that’s flaking off some of the rusty hydrants? The color used to be fire-engine red. It looks the way it does because rust is seeping into the paint.
“It’s oxidized,” said D’Agostino.
Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt is pitching a $571,688 plan to repaint all 1,952 of the city’s cast iron fire hydrants with money from the city’s water infrastructure enterprise fund. The fund is regularly replenished with revenues raised through utility fees and currently holds about $6.8 million. It’s been tapped in the recent past for repainting high service water tanks and installing new pipes on Mount Saint Charles Avenue without dipping into the general fund, which is built on tax revenues.
“One of the most consistent requests I get from constituents is the request to have fire hydrants in front of their houses painted,” says Baldelli-Hunt. “We’re fortunate that we don’t need to go to the general fund to be able
to do this.”
But residents anxious to see their timeworn neighborhood fire hydrants spiffed up may have to bite their fingernails a bit longer. The City Council has already tabled the proposal once, calling for a work session with the administration to discuss the details. During that meeting, which took place on Monday, D’Agostino elaborated on the plan and answered questions from members of the council.
Council President Dan Gendron said another meeting is scheduled for Monday, but unless D’Agostino can quickly clear up a few unresolved issues, the hydrant-painting plan probably won’t be ready for a vote by then.
It turns out that painting hydrants is a rather intensely regulated affair, owing largely to the likelihood that many of the hydrants are so old they were painted with lead-based pigment. The state Department of Environmental Management requires the city – or its designated bidder – to remove and recapture as much of the toxic lead paint as possible as part of the refurbishing process. Whatever can’t be removed must also be sealed, or “encapsulated,” before the undercoat is covered with a fresh coat of leadfree paint.
The mandatory lead-containment process represents one of the most costly facets of the job.
Gendron said the city went out to bid for repainting the hydrants on the assumption that 100 percent of them are covered with lead paint.
“We know that’s not true,” said Gendron. “Some of these hydrants are brand new.”
Gendron said members of the council want to know if the city can save money on the project by testing the hydrants to determine which are covered with lead paint and which aren’t. Also, he said, they want to know if a bidder will consider doing only the encapsulation phase of the work on those that are lead-painted, leaving the rest for city laborers.
“We want to find if there’s a cheaper way to handle it,” Gendron said Tuesday. “I don’t think it will make it to the next council meeting on Monday unless the public works director can provide us with those answers before tomorrow.”
In an interview at City Hall, D’Agostino said he has already tried bidding the job a number of ways, including limiting the total number of hydrants to be worked on to 300. In the bid that’s currently in play, covering 100 percent of the firefighting fixtures, the cost per hydrant boils down to $294. By doing it the other way, he said, the cost surged to well over $300 per hydrant.
The city is recommending that the contract be awarded to L.F. Clavin & Co. of Warwick. The only other bidder was Philip Baglione of Amex Inc. in East Boston, who proposed doing the work for $674,500.
Baldelli-Hunt likens the hydrant repairs to the condition of the city’s roads and public works fleet when she took office in 2013. Due to the lack of regular, cyclical replacement and maintenance of infrastructure, many roads were in poor shape and some vehicles were so neglected they were beyond repair and needed to be replaced. The hydrant situation is more of the same, she said, and points up the need for the city to hold fast to a regular program of infrastructure maintenance and replacement. D’Agostino concurs. “We’re playing catch up now because it’s never been done,” said D’Agostino “It’s like the road projects in the city – we were so far behind we have to play catch up. Once we do that, then we can think about a maintenance plan.”
D’Agostino estimates that 70 to 80 percent of the all the fire hydrants in the city are in need of prompt attention, or they will need to be replaced. The cost of replacing a fire hydrant is about nine times as much as repainting one, he said.