Recent storms did the Old Fort replica no favors.
A derecho at the end of June and other storms damaged roofs on some of the Old Fort buildings, in particular, the west officers’ quarters building.
Buildings Manager Doug Krogmeier told the city council he recently flew a drone over the depot, the museum and the fort to see what kind of damage the city’s facing.
The museum lost a few shingles, he said, and some tiles on the depot. Krogmeier said he expected insurance would cover those because they’re “standard storm damage scenarios.”
Several Old Fort buildings had some light roofing damage, including the east block house, which, Krogmeier said, can probably be patched and could get by for at least this year.
Krogmeier said he wasn’t terribly worried about the bunkhouse, which can also be patched up.
The south side of the west officers’ quarters is the roof that needs the most help, Krogmeier said.
“It’s pretty shot. It’s going to need to go. Now we’re going to pull shakes off that so we can patch some of the other buildings with what we’ve got,” he said. “But that one we’re looking at probably $15 grand just to have somebody come in and strip it off, sheet it and shingle it. And it’s the one that’s drywalled and air conditioned, and it’s going to deteriorate if we don’t get on it.”
Krogmeier said staff will check into what can be done, funding-wise and get back to the city council.
“But I’m probably going to start reaching out to contractors to see if anybody’s interested,” he said. “Now is the wrong time of year to do that because everybody’s busy. They all have a summer full of plans to get done. But it’s it’s in poor shape. So before we do anything, obviously we’re gonna run it through insurance and see what we can pull off.”
City Finance Director Peggy Steffensmeier said all of the Old Fort reserve has been used, as has the Friends of the Old Fort funds.
There’s around $8,500 in donations for the fort that haven’t been touched yet. Donations to Old Fort Madison are made through the Fort Madison Beautification Foundation.
Krogmeier said city staff will put numbers together.
“Originally it was you know, I was saying to do all the repairs we need what was $120,000,” he said. “And you said ‘ok, well let’s just stick to under $70,000 at the moment and figure it out.’”
City council member Rebecca Bowker said she would also like to track labor costs.
“Because you and Mark (Bousselot, public works director) and everybody who’s been spending a lot of city time doing that,” she said. “I feel like that has to be tracked and accounted for in the project.”
Bowker clarified she wasn’t saying to debit the account, but for accountability’s sake.
“I think we need to at least have that acknowledged that, you know yeah, we had X amount of dollars in hard costs, we had X amount of dollars, labor, because otherwise you guys should be doing other stuff,” she said.
Bousselot said most of the labor has been donated, off the clock.
The fort will be open Friday, Saturday and Sunday this weekend.
Mayor Matt Mohrfeld said he has had a “very, very preliminary” meeting with the Fort Madison tourism group to talk about the possibility of handling operations of the Old Fort.
Mohrfeld also sat down with Bousselot and Steffensmeier to talk about costs and what it would look like to pay for a group to operate the fort.
“And then we had the operational task force,” he said, “and we looked at what a proposal packet would look like to go out to potential providers of that service.”
There wouldn’t be any action, Mohrfeld said, without it coming through the city council.
“The concept being almost identical in theory to the way we we have outsourced the operations of the pool,” he said.