City to spend $350K on escalators

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - A temporary wall and temporary doors have been set up at city hall to block people from a major construction project. What's behind that wall and doors will cost you a lot of money but the city says it has no choice.

“They are approximately 20-25 years old,” Michael Riordan with the City of Albuquerque said.

He’s talking about the dusty, damaged and dangerous set of escalators leading from the street to the basement of city hall where city councilors and county commissioners meet.

“We've had other incidents in the past that we could fix,” said Riordan. “These cracks are of a significant nature that’s more structural and it's not something you can just repair, you have to replace them.”

City officials had to shut down the escalators in May after discovering the cracks. They quickly found out replacing these 20 plus year-old, people-movers is going to be very expensive.

“You can't buy escalators off the shelf because every depth is different every width is different, they have to be designed,” said Riordan.

It's going to cost $350 thousand to replace them. City officials thought about making the whole thing stairs but by the time you rip out the escalators and fill this up with concrete the cost is about the same.

“We want to make sure we do what is best for the taxpayer dollar,” said Riordan.

So the city will have new state of the art escalators installed. For now people are using the elevators to get to the basement, elevators that were just remodeled last year. The city says it has the money to complete the project through the general obligation bond that goes to city facilities.

The remodel will take some time, 16 months in fact. The city has blocked the escalators with temporary walls because they don't want anyone even walking on the broken down machines.

“It was a life and safety hazard issue, we didn't want to have people going up and down these escalators,” said Riordan.

The city had been spending between $10 and 20 thousand a year to maintain the old escalators. This new set will be under warranty for the next few years.

The city has put the project out to bid and it will be a few months before work will start on ripping out the old set of escalators.