Labor costs are higher than in Mass.
Kevin Cummings, owner of KC’s Tap/Club Cats in Pawtucket, says he has spent about $75,000 to comply with the state’s new fire code: to install a municipal fire alarm, upgrade the electrical system, install new exit signs and – the biggest item – to install sprinklers.
Risk Management Controls in Commercial Property and Liability Insurance
Businesses today are facing a risk landscape that is more volatile, more expensive, and less…
Learn More
It cost him $14,000 just to set up a new water line for the sprinklers, Cummings says: $5,000 for a permit required by the city to open the street’s water main, and roughly $9,000 to hire a contractor to lay pipe from the water main to the building, about 80 feet from the street.
“Fortunately I had other investments,” Cummings said when asked how he paid for it all. “The business itself can’t come close to supporting it.”
And the sprinklers would’ve cost him even more, Cummings said, if he hadn’t hired a contractor from Rockland, Mass., to do the job.
When he was shopping around, he found prices became cheaper the farther he traveled away from the city and state, even though proposals he got from the Massachusetts company and Rhode Island contractors were identical in terms of the amount of labor and materials required for installation.
“I wish someone could explain that to me,” he said.
Cummings wouldn’t go so far as to accuse local contractors of raising prices to take advantage of the demand created by the new laws passed in the wake of The Station fire in 2003, and the state attorney general’s consumer protection unit reports no complaints from business owners regarding price-gouging for sprinkler systems.
But Rhode Island prices do seem to be higher, and explanations for that phenomenon vary.
Dominick Kass, Northeast regional manager for the National Fire Sprinkler Association, said the cost of steel for steel pipes is three times what it used to be. The “steel crisis” started about three years ago as a result of China outbidding U.S. buyers for steel, he said.
Kass also said it costs more to install sprinklers in existing buildings than in new construction. Retrofitting older buildings requires more complicated engineering in terms of circumventing existing electrical wires, including light fixtures, he said. It also takes more time and more labor, which means higher costs.
Kass said the national average cost of fire sprinklers is $2 to $3 per square foot, but that price may vary depending on the size and scope of a project. The more walls and rooms a building has requires more piping, engineering and labor, which could up the price.
Rick Crowley Jr., vice president of AAA Sprinkler Co. in Cranston, said his company charges about $3 to $5 per square foot for fire sprinkler installation in new buildings, and more for installation in existing buildings.
Asked why sprinklers cost more in Rhode Island, Crowley said it is because the cost of labor is higher due to a lack of tradesmen to perform the work.
Because the state requires a 5-1 ratio of licensed sprinkler contractors to apprentices per company, many companies struggle to find opportunities to train new workers in the trade, Crowley said. As a result, companies have to charge higher fees for installation because they have to pay existing employees overtime.
“Non-union sprinkler companies have handcuffs on them when developing new workers for the trade” as a result of the 5-1 ratio, he said. “It’s not allowing young talent to develop.”
Rhode Island’s high health care and workers’ compensation insurance rates also affect the sprinkler companies, causing them to offset that cost by charging higher installation fees, Crowley said.
But higher installation fees for sprinkler systems are just one of many other costs of meeting fire code compliance for Rhode Island’s bars and nightclubs.
“It seems like everybody jumped on the bandwagon who could,” said Rick Lewis, co-owner of the Red Rock Bar & Grille in North Kingstown, who said he paid about $4 per square foot to install sprinklers in addition to $5,000 for the municipal alarm system.
Adding new water supplies for sprinklers is also a major expense for many businesses.
Paddy’s Beach Restaurant in Westerly spent $15,000 to run 100 feet of pipe from the street to its building, said Crowley, whose company did the job.
In addition, six of Rhode Island’s seven for-profit and municipal water supply utilities charge a standby, or private fire service charge, for the water sitting in fire sprinkler systems, said Tom Kogut, spokesman for the R.I. Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the state’s water suppliers.
Each of the six has its own standby rates, some of which are charged annually and some quarterly, he said. The Pawtucket Water Supply Board, for example, charges anywhere from $185 per year for a 2-inch-diameter pipe connection to $1,386 per year for an 8-inch-diameter pipe connection.
“I think everybody’s saying the same thing,” said Bob Rotondo, president of Tri-State Fire Protection, a Smithfield-based fire safety equipment company. “[Nightclub owners] should have been allowed more time. That’s a hefty cost they have to come up with.”
Rotondo said his company also struggles with expanding its work force to handle the increased demand for fire sprinkler installation, which causes higher installation fees.
“We had lots of opportunities to increase our sales,” he said based on higher demand for the product. “But we didn’t take them … we weren’t able to take on more people to do the work.”
