[dropcap]K[/dropcap]yle’s historic downtown water tower will be repainted and welded as part of negotiations with a contractor who also calls for improving two functioning water towers.
The historic water tower will be repainted in its original red, white and blue and welded to fix the roof.
“I’m actually really excited,” Councilmember Travis Mitchell said. “It’s going to be awesome.”
There has been some talk about having to tear the historic water tower down because it’s in pretty bad conditions, Mitchell said.
However, improvements, which would cost approximately $40,000, were negotiated at no additional cost to the city.
The contractor hired by the city was commissioned to paint the water tank on FM 1626 white and will paint and weld some weak areas in the metal on the Yarrington water tank, Sellers said.
“In that bid, because we were doing a pretty large project, two different tanks, we were able to negotiate in our budgeted dollar amount an improvement to our historic water tower,” City Manager Scott Sellers said. “We’re very excited by that.”
The move comes after the Kyle City Council sought a way in 2015 to rehabilitate the aging structure, which had not been in use since the early 2000s.
In 2014, the city commissioned Texas Tank Services to conduct a structural analysis for the tower. The analysis discovered corrosion on several features of the water tower, as well as holes in the internal roof plates of the structure.
But the report also called for $800,000 in rehabilitation options, which city leaders ultimately chose to not go forward with.
Mitchell said Jason Biemer, Kyle division manager – treatment operations manager, should get the credit for “creatively solving an aesthetic problem without dipping into taxpayer funds,”
“Everything should be structurally and visually sound when we’re done with this contract,” Sellers said.
