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Loans Would Be Offered To Downtown Building Owners
During a work session earlier this month, Lexington City Council discussed the possibility of implementing a program to help incentivize the owners of the buildings in the city’s historic downtown to put fire sprinklers in their buildings by offering loans from the city to cover the cost of the installation of the sprinkler system.
In September, Council allocated $250,000 as initial funds for the program, pending the approval of a proposal for it. The estimated cost to install sprinklers during the upcoming renovation of city hall is $70,000, so that amount could potentially fund sprinklers for multiple buildings.
At the Oct. 8 work session, Lexington Fire Chief Ty Dickerson, who previously worked in the fire sprinkler industry, noted that the best – and cheapest – way to install sprinklers was during new construction, and that major renovations were “a good replication” of that. Given that the program wouldn’t fund an entire renovation, he didn’t think it was something that would draw a large response from owners right away, but would be a more long-term project.
“This is going to be one of those things where 20 years from now, we’re seeing the fruits of this,” he said.
While the buildings in the downtown district may give the appearance of being fire resistant, Dickerson noted that during the fire at the Southern Inn in July of 2010, the fire spread to the Hallmark store next door. A crew had to be sent in to that building to stop the fire from spreading further, ripping, by Dickerson’s recollection, about 15-20 openings in the wall and ceiling. That action saved not only the Hallmark store, but the rest of the block.
The response from other fire departments in the area to the Southern Inn fire, he said, is not the same level of response that is available today due to dwindling numbers in departments throughout the area, including Lexington.
He noted a recent call to the Cook Out restaurant on Nelson Street, not for a fire but for a “substantial gas leak” in the Taqueria next door. The gas had spread into the Cook Out and into the Pack & Mail on the other side of the Taqueria.
One of the methods the department uses to address a gas leak is to get on the roof to vent the building, but Lexington’s ladder truck was undergoing maintenance, so they called for assistance from other departments. The Buena Vista Fire Department got the call first, but took over eight minutes to respond, so the call then went to the Glasgow Volunteer Fire Department, but only one of the two drivers needed to operate their tiller truck responded to the firehouse.
Buena Vista’s truck eventually arrived at the scene, arriving 11 minutes after the initial call, and a crew was able to access the roof to vent the gas.
Dickerson made it clear that he wasn’t “looking to bash” Buena Vista, Glasgow, or any other fire department, but he was blunt about the potential consequences of a delayed response in the event of a fire.
“If that had been a fire in the Taqueria extending to the adjoining occupancies, we wouldn’t have had enough people to accomplish what we accomplished at the Southern Inn, which was save the block,” he said.
While there are fire prevention efforts in place – facilitated in the city by Deputy Fire Chief Trent Roberts, the city’s fire marshal – Dickerson noted that those efforts won’t prevent all fires from happening because “there’s human behavior in there.”
“He’ll talk to a commercial occupancy about overuse of extension cords, and they’ll get rid of them. And then the next year or so, when you inspect again, that creep is back,” he said. “So you’ve got to put in that active protection, not a passive protection.”
Sprinklers are a form of active fire protection. Smoke detectors, though certainly important, are a more passive protection system, especially in commercial spaces that can sit empty overnight or on weekends.
“At three o’clock in the morning, in a commercial occupancy that’s vacant, it’s alerting nobody unless you’ve connected it to a monitored alarm system,” he said. “In our home, it’s waking us up and telling us to get out.”
According to the National Fire Protection Agency, fire damage in buildings with a sprinkler system is reduced by 40 to 70 percent over buildings without sprinklers, which could prevent a fire on the level of devastation as the one at The Southern Inn. While the restaurant was able to reopen in 2011 in the same building, that outcome, Dickerson said, is the exception, not the rule.
“An overwhelming majority of businesses that have a catastrophic fire never return,” he said. “Southern Inn reopening a year later in that same space was a lot of luck … If Buck’s Barber Shop burns down tonight, and two weeks from now I’m gonna need a haircut, I’m going to go someplace else. And even if they rebuild a year later, do I go back or have I gotten comfortable at the other place?”
Camille Miller, chair of the city’s Industrial Development Authority, said that, while the potential tragedy of a fire downtown was prevalent, she and the IDA were looking at the program from the potential economic development benefits it could have. It could potentially encourage building owners who thus far have not renovated or made use of the upper floors of their buildings due to the preventative upfront cost of installing a sprinkler system, which could open up more commercial or residential space downtown.
“We see this as a critical piece of Lexington’s future for economics and protection of our history,” she said.
Another element to the program that could incentivize owners to install sprinklers is the fact that the fee for hooking the tap for the sprinkler system into the city’s water system would be forgiven. Council member David Sigler inquired about only forgiving half of the fee, and Miller said that the IDA would advocate for 100 percent forgiveness, because otherwise the incentives for participating in the program are limited.
“Until we reach a point of critical mass, a tipping point, we’ve got to have skin in the game to encourage property owners to do the right thing,” she said.
City Manager Tom Carroll said that the next step in the process is to work with City Attorney Jeremy Carroll to prepare the loan documents for the program, and he estimated that the program could be “up and running” in a three- to six-month time frame.
