Nothing is indestructible. Everything breaks. So what happens when crucial city equipment like snowplows and dump trucks fail?
The answer is pretty simple: The city fixes them. But repairing and maintaining more than 300 pieces of equipment – all with different purposes, problems and price points – can be a daunting task.
The city spends millions of dollars each year to maintain, repair and replace vehicles, heavy equipment and motorized tools, budget documents show. Four full-time mechanics and one part-timer work for the city at a shop in Bodo Industrial Park. Many of them have worked for the city for decades, said Levi Lloyd, director of city operations.
The city has a warehouse where it keeps spare parts for most of its vehicles, and if the city doesn’t have the part, most times it can be overnighted to Durango, he said.
“We have a pretty robust fleet management program,” Lloyd said. “We have really talented mechanics, they keep us up and running.”
A big part of the city’s fleet management program is maintenance, said Ron LeBlanc, city manager. It helps with keeping the vehicles in use and also improves the resale value when the city needs to replace equipment, he said. The city performs all the maintenance work on all city vehicles, including anything as minor as an oil change in a police cruiser to more complicated tasks like replacing hydraulic lines on a dump truck.
City employees who operate municipal equipment are also required to do safety checks on their vehicles to ensure everything is in working order before it’s used, LeBlanc said.
But regardless of how much routine maintenance is performed on city vehicles, things still break, Lloyd said. Snowplows and street sweepers are particularly troublesome, he said. The extreme environments those pieces of equipment operate in cause significant wear and tear that most other vehicles don’t encounter.
Snowplow controls break when the blades hit ice chunks on the road, and dust produced while street sweeping gets into the mechanics of street sweepers, causing them to break.
And when snowplows break during extreme weather events, those vehicles take precedence over other maintenance, Lloyd said. For example, if a snowplow breaks during a major storm, mechanics will drop whatever they’re doing to get the plow back on the road, he said.
Routine maintenance on city equipment will keep it operating, but at some point, it costs the city more to maintain the vehicle than it would to replace it, Lloyd said.
Different vehicles have different lifespans. For example, the Durango Police Department uses a typical police cruiser for about three years, Lloyd said. The city’s grader – a piece of heavy equipment with two blades, one in front and one underneath – will likely never be replaced, LeBlanc said.
In 2019, according to the approved budget, the city is replacing $2.66 million worth of city equipment, including six Chevy Tahoes with a total cost of $344,298, two Toro lawnmowers with a total cost of $125,338 and one solid-waste garbage truck at a cost of $262,174.
“When they get to a certain number of hours or miles, we sell them at auction and get new ones,” Lloyd said. “They get to a point where you put more into the day-to-day maintenance than is cost-effective.”
bhauff@durangoherald.com
A previous version of this story reported the city has nine full-time mechanics. The city has four full-time mechanics.
