City’s heavy equipment vehicles termed ‘unsafe’

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

City commissioners are used to department heads begging for project funding during preliminary budget workshops. But a plea from Greg Veliz, Key West’s community services director, got their attention.

Veliz was asking for $300,000 to purchase a new backhoe and bucket truck, two pieces of expensive, heavy-duty equipment. He asked to replace the bucket truck five years ago and was told to purchase a used vehicle. He did. But that won’t work anymore, he said last week.

“Our bucket trucks are shot. They’re not safe. We’re putting people in the air in things that aren’t safe,” he told commissioners at their July 21 budget workshop.

Every year, Veliz said, he comes before the commission asking to purchase new vehicles. And every year he is instructed to hang on to the aging fleet, repairing the machinery instead of trading it in on new equipment. He also gets “hand me down” trucks from the police and code enforcement departments. Veliz himself is driving an old police canine truck.

“It’s just come to a point now where I’ve spent so much in fleet maintenance to rehab this equipment and keep it running. It’s dead,” he declared.

Frequent equipment breakdowns are anticipated to cost approximately $72,000 in fiscal year 2014, the amount Veliz has included in his proposed community services budget. And he has created a five-year purchase cycle that will replace all 15 of the city’s heavy equipment vehicles. But the top priority is a new backhoe and bucket truck, he said.

His description of continuing to use what he considered unsafe equipment got the commissioners’ attention.

“If you continue to put Band Aids on the bleeding, in the long run you’ll pay more,” Commissioner Tony Yaniz said. “To me, that’s the real scary part, that you have a piece of equipment that you keep reusing and rehabbing and somebody gets hurt on it. Then it’s going to come back on us because we didn’t do the right thing.”

“We’ve got a recurring theme here of things we’ve put off that we’re now paying the piper for,” said Commissioner Teri Johnston. “Although you submit a budget and it gets chopped and chopped and chopped, that’s not necessarily the best thing for the community.”

One piece of good news came from Assistant City Manager Sarah Spurlock, who said the $300,000 could come out of reserves, not the general fund, which is already oversubscribed with requests for project funding in the upcoming fiscal year. The city has an unusually large amount in the reserve fund this year because of higher than expected revenues in the current fiscal year. City policy is to keep 70 to 91 days of operating expenses in reserve, an amount totaling between $7.9 million and $10.3 million. Currently, the fund has money totaling 105 days of operating expenses, 14 more than required, totaling approximately $1.6 million. Under city policy, that overage can be spent on one-time expenses.

“Not recurring operating expenses but things that are ‘one and done.’ So that’s the backhoe, the bucket truck, the archive issue in Tampa,” Spurlock said.

In last summer’s budget planning for the current fiscal year, city officials used two of the 91 days of reserve funds to pay for one-off spending projects.

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