Chris Stewart knows this about painting a city water tower: You don’t want to use cheap paint.

That’s because it isn’t cheap or easy to paint one of the massive steel structures, so you want to make sure it is done right the first time. Stewart, the city’s assistant director of utilities, said a recent painting of the water tower just north of Clinton Parkway and Kasold Drive cost $350,000 and took the better part of three months.

“You definitely want to have good paint and have a good contractor because it is not something you want to do over real soon,” Stewart said.

The city hired TMI Coatings, a St. Paul, Minn., company that specializes in painting water towers. Stewart said the crews earned their money. They stretched a large white tent over the entire water tower to ensure that none of the sprayed paint drifted onto neighboring properties. Stewart also said the crews did more than the public may have realized. In addition to painting the outside of the 1.5 million gallon tank, they also painted the inside of the tank to prevent corrosion.

The painting portion of the project is complete. Stewart said crews should be off the site next week after they finished up cleanup and landscaping work. He said the crews were getting done at just the right time. Since the tank had to be drained for the paint job, Stewart said it was critical that the tank be back in service in time for the summer lawn watering season or else residents throughout West Lawrence would experience low water pressure.

Some other facts about the city’s water towers:

¢ The city has five water towers and each needs to be painted about every 15 years. Stewart says the city usually has a painting project every five years. The Kasold water tower was last painted in 1988.

¢ The Kasold tank is the city’s largest tank in terms of capacity at 1.5 million gallons. The average city water tower holds about 500,000 gallons. But the Kasold tank is actually one of the shorter water towers in the city at 60 feet tall. The city’s tallest water tower is near Sixth Street and Kasold Drive and is 150 feet tall.

¢ The Kasold tank was built in the 1970s. The city’s oldest water towers are located on Mt. Oread and were built in the 1940s. Stewart said a water tower could easily have a life span of 60 years or more.

¢ Stewart said there was no great formula in choosing the color for a water tower. “We usually just go with what we’ve had in the past,” Stewart said. “We don’t want a big change because people may not like it, and that would be hard to fix.”