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City moves forward with emergency boiler replacements after jail loses heat and inmates transported out of Lodi
Summary
City staff said emergency replacements for two failed boilers were necessary after one unit failed and a second had been offline; the city temporarily closed its jail and transported inmates to San Joaquin County, and council approved the emergency procurement as part of consent actions.
City staff told the Lodi City Council that an emergency replacement of two large boilers was needed after repeated failures left the city’s 24-hour police station and jail without heat. Sean Nathan (public works staff) said one boiler had been out of service about a year and the second failed within weeks, forcing staff to use portable heaters and eventually close the jail.
“[The] jail did go down because the temperature was too low. It was closed for that entire duration about 2 to 3 weeks,” said Captain Versteeg of the Police Department, noting that officers had to transport inmates to San Joaquin County — an hour each way — for booking, which significantly increased officer time per booking and reduced local policing capacity.
Nathan told the council that the units had been planned in the capital improvement program (CIP) with estimated replacement costs of about $40,000 per unit but that emergency procurement raised per-unit costs to roughly $60,000. He said crews used an existing on-call contract to speed the procurement and installation, avoiding new insurance delays and achieving a turnaround of about a week for one unit; the second unit was scheduled for installation in the following days.
Council members asked how long the jail had been inoperable and whether inmates had to be moved; Captain Versteeg confirmed the 2–3 week outage and described the operational impacts of off-site bookings.
The council approved the consent calendar after pulling several items for discussion; the emergency boiler replacement was handled as part of the pulled items discussion and staff justification for an emergency contract. Staff said the emergency route was chosen because waiting for a competitive CIP procurement could have taken three to four months.
The city did not provide a detailed line-item breakdown of total emergency expenditures in the meeting discussion; staff provided the comparative estimates ($40,000 CIP vs. ~$60,000 emergency) and noted typical emergency premium costs. Council did not modify the emergency procurement but asked staff to provide further details to the council as requested.
