BIDDEFORD — Last week the City Council voted to put two bonds on the November ballot, and city officials are hopeful voters will approve both.

The first – a $2.27 million bond for repairs at City Hall, including the restoration of its clock tower – has been in the pipeline for some time. Officials fear if it does not pass, the city could lose the rapidly deteriorating, 120- year-old clock tower, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and which many have hailed as the icon of the city.

Phil Radding, the city’s facilities manager, told the Journal Tribune in June that the city paid for $225,000 worth of restoration work on the tower about seven years ago, but it has been decades since any “significant work” has been done on it. Radding said a restoration project would include repointing the bricks, stripping and replacing all of the wood, fixing the windows, and bringing the tower back to its original color: dark red.

Residents have twice voted down bonds to pay for the work.

“I am optimistic on the bond for City Hall (repairs), as every passing year means additional costs,” Mayor Alan Casavant said in an email Saturday. “We are hoping to get pictures of the tower, so that people can appreciate the ongoing deterioration. The building is iconic, designed by John Calvin Stevens, and it is historically important that we repair the structure.”

John Calvin Stevens – a famed architect who also designed the Biddeford City Theater building, as well as municipal buildings in Skowhegan, Cornish and Portland – designed City Hall in 1894.

Additionally, Casavant said the repairs would make City Hall safer and more energy efficient.

“So many of the windows are leaking or are secured by sticks, and, most importantly, while we enforce sprinkler systems in all similar private buildings, City Hall does not have a such a system,” he said, adding that the original City Hall building, which was built on the same site in the 1860s, burned to the ground in 1894. The current one was built less than a year later.

The second bond voters will be asked to approve in the Nov. 3 election is a $3.925 million bond for sewer work.

Tom Milligan, the city’s engineer, said Monday that bonds for sewer work have traditionally passed in Biddeford, except last year, when all three referendum questions failed. This year he hopes voters will have a change of heart. If not, the work will have to be paid for another way – perhaps through people’s taxes.

“We’re under a consent decree from the feds and the DEP to eliminate combined sewer overflows,” explained Milligan. “It’s a mandated program. If we don’t do it, they’ll fine us and we’ll have to do it anyways. If we don’t continue to make progress, we’ll be out of compliance.”

Milligan said the work will primarily address sewer overflows in the downtown area.

Even though voters shot down a bond for sewer work last November, Milligan said the city is still on schedule with the mandated plan for sewer repairs after receiving grants from the Department of Environmental Protection. He estimated that there is still about $40 million worth of work left to do on the city’s sewer system, and approving a bond for the work this year will bring the city one step closer to completing it.

— Staff Writer Angelo J. Verzoni can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 329 or averzoni@journaltribune.com.