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Twenty-year-old Beaverton City Hall will undergo a seismic upgrade next month on the heels of a $975,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The city will use as much as $1.3 million to make structural changes to comply with current Oregon and federal building codes. FEMA gave the city $975,000 provided Beaverton matched $325,000 of it.
The 77,740-square-foot City Hall, comprising a two-story building adjoining a three-story building, was built in 1986 in compliance with the 1982 Uniform Building Code. FEMA’s grant will cover the entire cost of the seismic upgrade, and there may be money left over for other improvements, Mike Mumaw, emergency manager with the city, said.
FEMA dictates any extra money must go toward seismic-related upgrades at City Hall, he said.
“Things we’re looking at (if there is extra money) are reinforcing our utility systems to bring them up to current code or putting safety glass in windows around and above the exits,” he said.
The International Building Code replaced the Uniform Building Code in 2004 in Oregon.
The upgrade entails adding steel drag struts that will spread vibrations or extra load more evenly across the building and channel them through the stairwells into the ground, Mumaw said.
“The stairwells act as the shear walls,” he said, “which should damper the effect of the sway of the building.”
After the city completes the upgrades by the end of the year, he said, the building will be able to resist seismic forces 50 percent stronger than those it can withstand now.
The city’s last major seismic upgrade was to its 33,000-square-foot Operations Center, a four-building complex on Allen Boulevard. The retrofits performed in 2001 cost $166,000.
The difference in the two projects’ budgets stems from the fact that the Operations Center comprises four single-story buildings, three of which are used for storage, Mumaw said, making the center’s retrofits less expensive than City Hall’s.
“One of the things we’ve been battling is spiraling construction costs,” Mumaw said. “The design options involved in City Hall’s upgrade involved a lot of steel, which kept the price high and justified the grant amount.”
The grant was awarded under FEMA’s Pre-disaster Mitigation Program.
For 2007, Congress set aside $100 million for the program, which offers competitive grants, technical assistance and program support. So far, 47 states, seven Indian tribal governments and three territories have applied for $80 million in grants, according to FEMA.
Colamette Construction Co. of Sherwood will perform the work with two subcontractors, Contech Services of Vancouver, which will strengthen the stairwells using fiber-reinforced polymer, and Columbia Wire & Iron Works of Portland, which will add steel beams and reinforce the stairwells.
Beaverton City Hall houses about 200 employees of its police, community development, public works, human resources and finance departments.