Decades of “kicking the can down the road” have caught up with one of Franklin’s most iconic buildings.

Spurred by last year’s ultimatum from Fire Chief Michael Foss, the city council on Monday unanimously voted to spend up to $60,000 to start the process of fixing a slew of fire-code violations that have accumulated at the 128-year-old Franklin Opera House, which also functions as city hall. The alternative could make the building all but unusable.

“I’m not going to physically throw a chain on the door, put firefighters there to hold people back … but if they don’t do this, they will be operating at great risk,” said Foss.

He said that if the city has posted a building permit by the end of July, indicating that a contractor has been hired to perform necessary upgrades, he will issue a notice of hazardous conditions and stop providing what are known as fire watches, keeping a firefighter in the building whenever capacity exceeds 99 people to handle any emergencies. That would make it legally tenuous to continue using the building for public events and perhaps for city business.

Mayor Jo Brown said the city council vote will use money from the sale of a city-owned building at 599 S. Main St. to tackle the situation. The goal is to have request for proposals issued quickly enough to meet Foss’ deadline.

“The intent is to keep it as public historic building. There is very, very much interest to keeping it,” she said.

Brown said she felt that Foss’ demand came because he felt “OK, we’ve kicked this can down the road enough. If anything happens it would be on him, so he took action.”

History

The handsome building on Central Street is part of Soldiers Memorial Hall, which was built in 1892 for the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization for Civil War veterans. Over the decades it has had a host of roles, housing the police department and a courthouse at one time. It now contains the offices for the city administration and Franklin Footlight Theatre, and draws crowds of up to 299, its current capacity, for musical shows and plays.

But generations of Franklin officials have been reluctant to spend enough on upkeep for this old building, particularly since the city has faced other financial needs as it worked to move past its reputation as a seedy former mill town. Portions of Opera House have been shut for years at a time, accumulating trash and quietly decaying.

The problem has been obvious to many people for a long time, even if spending didn’t follow.

“Since 1960 or so, fire chiefs have started lots of documents, done lots of inspections, to basically notify city leadership that we’ve got problems. The city has done minor corrections – some alarms, fire curtains, better signs – but not enough,” said Foss. “There have been a lot of band aids put on the building.”

This is not an uncommon situation. Governments are never enthusiastic about spending taxpayer dollars on building maintenance that is invisible to voters and will often delay upkeep as long as they possibly can, then are faced with price tags of six or seven figures when they want to make use of historic buildings in downtowns and villages.

The result can be seen from the Houston Barn in Hopkinton to the  120-year-old clock tower on  Main Street in Suncook to the Merrimack County courthouse in Concord, where communities are scrambling to get the money to make up for past neglect.

The Opera House is somewhat unusual because it is so heavily used despite the drawbacks.

Foss said he was surprised after becoming chief four years ago to find that the Opera House hadn’t had an assembly or occupancy permit issued for years even though it is occupied daily by city staff and the public, who come to pay taxes and get licenses among other things, and the upgrade stage area hosts events that draw hundreds of people.

“The code issues are so great we needed an independent fire protection engineer to do a study,” Foss said. “He gave us, like, 12 pages of code violations that needed to be addressed.”

These ranged from inadequate alarm and detection systems to the lack of a sprinkler system to “void spaces” where fire can build up undetected to a shortage of fire exit doors.  “All the wiring in the building is outdated. Most of it is old knob-and-tube wiring,” Foss said.

Completely upgrading the building will be expensive, potentially costing millions.

“The bones of the building are good. It’s a good structure, a lot of historical value, and the council says it’s important to keep the historical look and feel and charm to the building,” said Foss. “But it needs to be safe for people.”

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