Destruction of Carson City Kinkead building to begin next month

The contract has been awarded and the Kinkead Building is about to come crashing down.

Advance Installations of Sparks will start tearing down the long-abandoned structure after Public Works issues a “Notice to Proceed” on Oct. 16.

Public Works Manager Gus Nuñez said Tuesday the company was low among nine bidders for the job at $926,307. He said other bids were much higher, ranging up to $1.7 million to demolish what has been described as the worst office building the state of Nevada has ever built.

But despite the wishes of some state officials who once had offices in Kinkead, plans don’t include imploding the building. Nuñez said the contractor told him imploding it would add $100,000 to the cost.

Advance Installations, he said, will deal with the soft material inside Kinkead — even the sheetrock. Nuñez said that includes asbestos removal.

But he said he thinks the company will actually subcontract the demolition of the concrete structure itself. Stripping the interior could take up to seven weeks so the exterior demolition will probably start in late November or early December.

That fits with Nuñez’s desire to have Kinkead down and cleaned up before he retires at the end of the year.

“What they may do is crush the exterior columns and bring the building down floor by floor,” he said.

To do that, he said the contractor plans to bring in a 60-foot high reach machine to mechanically crush the steel and concrete. Nuñez said the contractor for the exterior work is Las Vegas Demolition, the Southern Nevada company that helped take down such icons as the Riviera and Palace Station.

He said all the concrete and rebar along with a large percentage of the interior materials will be recycled.

The building has had problems since it was completed in 1975. Within a few months, the floors started tilting, windows leaked and concrete chunks broke lose in the core of the structure. It has been vacant nearly a decade because of fears an earthquake might bring it down. It has survived only because of more pressing needs for the small pot of capital improvement funding the state had available through the recession. The money to demolish Kinkead was proposed in three previous budgets but deleted because of shortfalls.

Police and fire have been using it for training exercises but public works officials were becoming wary of continuing to allow even that use because the structure was in such bad shape.