Centralia City Hall is located at 118 W. Maple St. in Centralia.
More than 2,500 square feet of the roof on Centralia City Hall needs to be repaired after heavy rainfall in December caused widespread leakage.
The city council on Tuesday approved a small works bid of $32,573.61 for McCann’s Property Plus to fix the section of roofing that needs the most immediate attention. The Centralia-based contractor will install a rubberized membrane, remove and replace metal flashing inside the brick wall and apply new mortar to the brick itself.
Water entered the city attorney’s office, the building’s kitchen and even municipal court offices on the ground floor. City Manager Rob Hill said during a city council meeting Tuesday that it’s time to stop chasing down and fixing individual leaks and focus on a permanent fix.
“If you’ve seen the volume of water coming through … we were like, ‘wow, we have to take on a bigger piece of this roof,’ ” Hill said.
Community Development Director Emil Pierson said the work approved Tuesday is considered the first phase of the roof replacement project and that staff have already broken down the remainder into additional phases. He assured councilors it wasn’t going to be a patch job that gets torn up as part of a larger rebuild.
City staff are exploring ways to rework the building’s HVAC system so that when the rest of the roof is redone, the HVAC units up there won’t need to be put back on a structure that wasn’t designed to support that much weight.
