Invercargill's Water Tower back under spotlight

Friday, 6 December 2019

Invercargill city council water manager Alister Murray at Invercargill's Water Tower.

A group of councillors have called for Invercargill's Water Tower strengthening work to be put on hold, although a city council report says doing nothing is not an option.

In April the council decided it would strengthen the Water Tower to 67 percent of the building code and open it back up to the public.

An Invercargill sun rise looking east along Leet Street towards the Water Tower.

The cost of the upgrade was expected to be $1.3m and a fund of nearly $1.5m was in this year's council budget to carry out the work.

Work on Invercargill's iconic Water Tower building has yet to start.

Five councillors - Nobby Clark, Toni Biddle, Lindsay Abbott, Allan Arnold, and Ian Pottinger - along with Mayor Sir Tim Shadbolt, have signed a motion to scrap strengthening the Water Tower for now.

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The motion recommends that the council leave it to a later date.

However, in response to the motion, which will be tabled at the next full council meeting on Tuesday, the council's water manager Alister Murray prepared a report which says there were only two options.

The options were to either strengthen both the Water Tower and the control building to the north, or demolish them both.

'There is no 'do nothing' approach',' the report says.

The report says the buildings were declared as 'earthquake-prone' which constitutes a major risk to public safety and infrastructure. It included a threat to the continuous operation of the city's main pump station.

Both the Water Tower and the control building are category one historic buildings, and at the moment have a rating of 25 percent of the national building standard.

The Water Tower functioned as a backup water supply role but the report says it was also part of Invercargill's identity.

Deputy Mayor Toni Biddle said by putting the motion forward it had flushed out new information, in regard to the council report which followed.

Biddle was keen for more concrete information around what the timeframe was for the Water Tower work, as well as other projects.

Mayor Tim Shadbolt said he could not comment, in regard to the next step for Water Tower, until he heard all of the information at the next council meeting.