Zachariah Hughes
Anchorage Daily News, Alaska
(TNS)
Sep. 14—The Municipality of Anchorage has some clunkers in its vehicle fleet.
A dump truck with a quarter-million miles. Snow graders with engines in desperate need of a rebuild. A boiler truck from the Reagan administration.
Many of these machines are so old and used up that they are breaking down, which is delaying, diminishing and degrading essential services. Deferred maintenance and years of budget reductions amount to what city leaders recently characterized as a systematic underinvestment in machinery that is essential for infrastructure and public safety.
“The equipment that we are actually putting out on the street is in a pretty significant state of under-repair, of disrepair and underinvestment,” Chief Administrative Officer Bill Falsey said during an Assembly work session in August.
Some of the most dramatic examples of fleet failure are within the Anchorage Police Department. Many of the department’s cruisers have been pushed well beyond their limits, which means the city is continually sinking money into an accumulating pile of repairs. At a Public Safety Committee meeting last fall, the department showed Assembly members pictures of cars coming apart at the seams, with warped exterior panels, shredded interior upholstery, pits of rust and odometers with more than 200,000 miles clocked — double the upper-end of industry standards.
“I have plenty of accounts of officers telling me that they couldn’t find a vehicle for several hours of their shift when theirs broke down, or caught on fire en route to a call and had to pull off to the side of the road,” Capt. Josh Nolder told the committee. “They’re not being able to respond to calls as fast as they likely could.”
The city owns a lot of motors: 416 cars and trucks, 130 pieces of heavy equipment like dump trucks and snow blowers, and then all 571 of the Anchorage Police Department’s vehicles. Some departments that run big machines, like fire and garbage utility, purchase and maintain their vehicles separately from the rest of the fleet.
In a lengthy transition report prepared by the outgoing Bronson administration, Maintenance and Operations Director Shay Throop identified one of the department’s main challenges as “(The) imminent collapse of the ability of the Municipality to provide basic government services (APD, Street Maintenance) due to the aged state of the fleet without additional funding replacement.”
[Previous coverage: Transition documents expose big staffing, financial problems across Anchorage city government, threatening core services]
Other department directors cited similar issues, from aging vehicles to neglected maintenance to having so many machines sidelined that workers were not able to do their jobs.
The reliability of the Anchorage Fire Department’s fleet, for example, has eroded to the point they cannot pull firefighting apparatuses out of rotation for preventive maintenance work.
“There have been many days when we did not have an apparatus for crews to respond with,” Fire Chief Doug Schrage wrote in the report. “There are numerous new engines and ambulances in various stages of construction, but long lead times, component shortages, and increased costs beyond available funding have created a situation where we haven’t been able to get back on replacement schedule. This is exacerbated by increased call volumes, adding to maintenance and repair needs.”
During the August meeting, Municipal Manager Becky Windt Pearson said the report painted a picture of the city as “in a state of crisis across a couple of axes,” with the looming f