L..A. County plans to pay more to upgrade the Gas Company Tower than it did to buy the downtown skyscraper in the first place.
County officials agreed last November to pay $200 million for the 52-story tower, which they planned to make the new headquarters for county employees.
The estimated price tag to earthquake-proof the tower: more than $230 million. Lennie LaGuire, a spokesperson for the county Chief Executive Office, said the tower is already safe, and the upgrades are “proactive.”
County officials had said some improvements to the tower might be necessary, but the cost and extent had been murky until now.
This week, the county received final proposals from firms looking to secure a contract for “voluntary seismic upgrades” to the Gas Company Tower, located at 555 W. 5th Street.
The Chief Executive Office, which negotiated the purchase, stressed in a statement that the seismic work was expected and far cheaper than the estimated $1 billion it would take to retrofit the county’s current downtown headquarters, the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, which was built in 1960 and is vulnerable to collapse during the next major earthquake.
The Gas Company Tower “does not require any seismic work to provide a safe, up-to-code and modern workplace for County employees. The County is choosing to perform this work proactively with an eye to the future, to ensure that the building performs optimally in the decades ahead,” LaGuire said. “The cost of this work, even when combined with the cost of the building, is a fraction of the cost of making urgently needed and long-overdue seismic and life safety improvements to the Hall of Administration.”
The $200-million sale was considered a bargain compared with the building’s appraised value of more than $600 million a few years earlier — a symptom of plummeting downtown office values.
Supervisor Janice Hahn, the only board member who opposed the purchase, said Friday that county officials never should have entered into the real estate transaction before they “had all the facts” on the cost.
“This is turning out to be a bigger boondoggle than was originally sold to the public,” said Hahn, who said she had not been told about the upgrade costs. “I am only more convinced that we are better off retrofitting the historic Hall of Administration and keeping the heart of county government in our Civic Center.”
At the time of the sale, Hahn argued that the purchase would be a fatal blow to downtown’s civic heart and make the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration obsolete. The building is named after her father, who served a record 10 terms as a supervisor.
The Hall of Administration is one of several county-owned properties considered vulnerable in an earthquake. The Gas Company Tower, built in 1991, was considered much safer, but at the time of the county purchase, it was unclear whether it was fully earthquake-proof.
The tower is one of many L.A. skyscrapers that incorporates a “steel moment frame” as part of its structure. In the 1994 Northridge earthquake, buildings with the frame did not collapse, but some were badly damaged.
Most of the seismic strengthening for the Gas Company Tower would involve “reinforcing of the welded steel moment frame connections,” according to the request for proposal for the $234.5-million project.
The contract will be awarded in October, according to the bidding documents, and the tower could be occupied during construction. County officials said they have already begun moving employees into the tower.
Times staff writers Roger Vincent and Rong-Gong Lin II contributed to this report.
