City keeps fleet-repair vendor despite higher costs, slow fixes

When a Pittsburgh firetruck’s check-engine light came on in August, Deputy Fire Chief Michael Mullen initially thought he had plenty of other vehicles available for Brookline’s station.

But the first spare truck had a faulty pump, and the second’s ladder rack motor was burned out. He kept checking spare engines “until I exhausted all of the eight pumpers shown as being available,” he wrote in an email to other city officials.

“If there is anyone who thinks that this is acceptable, I would welcome them to respond with

their reasons why,” he wrote.

Deputy Chief Mullen’s challenge capped six months of concerns about maintenance of some of the city’s public safety vehicles. A controller’s audit found that the repair vendor, First Vehicle Services, was more expensive than expected and often failed to get vehicles back on the road promptly.

Nonetheless on Tuesday, after five minutes of public discussion, city council approved a five-year, $46 million new contract with First Vehicle, which was the only bidder.

“Competition is always good, but you don’t want to just make change for change’s sake,” city budget director Sam Ashbaugh said.

Departmental officials responsible for vehicles were asked if they were satisfied with the vendor's performance, he added, saying, “To a man, they said yes.”

“It’s disappointing when you only get one bidder in a competitive bidding process,” Controller Michael Lamb said. In similar circumstances in the past, he said, “we’ve gone back out to bid again.”

He called the garage’s turnaround time on public safety vehicle repairs “a problem. … We have to have that fleet available.”

Before 2005, the city employed mechanics to fix the roughly 1,000 vehicles it owns. That year, under pressure from fiscal overseers, it inked a deal with First Vehicle of Cincinnati to privately run its Strip District repair shop. The deal aimed to cut maintenance and repair costs from roughly $5.5 million to $4 million.

By 2014, though, the city was paying First Vehicle $8 million annually. Next year, the price tag is likely to approach $9 million, for which the company will stock the garage with parts, plus 55 employees — five managers, nine clerks, 39 technicians, a laborer and a tire repairman.

Mr. Ashbaugh blamed the cost on the age and complexity of the city fleet.

“Almost 45 percent of our vehicles exceed their recommended life cycle,” he said.

Some, though, blamed the garage, not the vehicles.

“The city has made great headway into improving our apparatus with purchases over a number of years,” said Ralph Sicuro, president of the firefighters’ union. “The only problem and frustration we see is with the garage repairing and maintaining the fleet the city has kept up to date. The concern comes with increasing amount of time to turn around vehicles with repairs or maintenance, leaving us with little to no spare apparatus.”

In February, a month into his tenure as public safety director, Wendell Hissrich wrote in an email to other city officials that he’d heard “that the service from First Vehicle is far less than adequate.”

“Most noticeable was with the police vehicles,” Mr. Hissrich said Friday. “I went to one zone in which three officers were being placed in one car because they didn’t have enough police vehicles.”

In April, Deputy Fire Chief Frank E. Large wrote that “five of the seven firstline engines in the third battalion are currently out of service.” And in May, Deputy Chief Mullen wrote that he had “no spare aerials.”

By May, the city had purchased five used firetrucks from San Diego. Nonetheless, in June, Thomas Cook, the assistant fire chief for operations, wrote that 12 firetrucks — more than onefifth of the fleet — were unavailable.

Internal emails show that Emergency Medical Services has occasionally been down to one or zero spare ambulances. However Jeff Tremel, who heads the paramedics’ union, said he has never seen a situation in which a crew couldn’t get a working vehicle.

“While we are proud of the work we have done in and for the city, we are always open to feedback,” First Vehicle spokesman Jay Brock said in a statement. “To that end, we regularly meet with city officials, and have consistently taken appropriate action to better support the needs of the city.”

The company declined to address several specific questions from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

First Vehicle is supposed to fix public safety vehicles within 24 hours 84 percent of the time and within 48 hours 94 percent of the time, or face penalties. Most months in 2013 and 2014, First Vehicle did not meet those turnaround standards (see chart). During those years, according to the audit, the company was penalized $29,145 for failing to meet turnaround standards.

In his June audit, Mr. Lamb recommended heftier penalties when First Vehicle failed to meet the standards. The company opposed that suggestion.

The new contract does not alter the penalties, and it eliminates a small incentive payment that the city has made when First Vehicle hit its targets, Mr. Ashbaugh said.

“I think it’s a step backward,” Mr. Lamb said of the change. “Our goal here is to get these vehicles turned around in a timely way so they can serve the people of this city. And penalties do work.”

Mr. Ashbaugh said the city prefers to work with First Vehicle on process improvements. For instance, the company will automatically schedule preventive maintenance based on vehicle mileage, improving efficiency.

This year, First Vehicle is in the sixth year of a five- to seven-year pact with the city. The city issued a request for competing proposals and reached out to around 10 firms, of which three showed up at a meeting. Only First Vehicle, though, submitted a proposal.

Among the firms that attended the meeting but didn’t submit a proposal was Shenandoah Fleet Maintenance and Management, which this year won, from First Vehicle, the job of maintaining the Allegheny County fleet. In a news release, Virginia-based Shenandoah indicated that it will get around $2 million a year to maintain the county’s 750 vehicles and equipment pieces.

Shenandoah vice president Dave Jones did not respond to phone messages or an email.

Mr. Hissrich, the city’s public safety chief, said his concerns have largely been addressed.

“I don’t hear any complaints,” he said. “I was at Zone 5 today. … I saw a parking lot full of police vehicles, which wasn’t the case when I first came around.”