Anchorage’s large vehicle fleet is at risk of ‘imminent collapse’ after years of underinvestment

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 fleet liability as one of the most major — prompting members of Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s new administration to begin digging further into it.

“What we do understand is that we’ve been systematically underfunding our fleet needs all the way back to the (Dan) Sullivan administration, if not longer,” Windt Pearson said in an interview. “Every year we build a larger and larger backlog of vehicles that need to be replaced and maintained ... Now we’re approaching a real tipping point where we’re going to start to see, operationally, the impact of that prolonged underinvestment.”

The extent of that underinvestment varies from year to year, according to Windt Pearson. But it has accumulated to a degree that now officials worry residents will soon experience “a very real, tangible impact on the quality of service,” most particularly in snow removal and public safety.

As they learn more about the extent of the issue, members of the administration are in the early stages of figuring out how an infusion of money from a bond proposition put to voters could help.

‘It’s how hard we’ve been working them’

Some of the city’s most impressive machines hibernate inside a large, dim shed in an industrial area just off the road to the airport. Graders, sweepers, blowers, excavators and other equipment are organized into sections according to function. Some are new and state-of-the-art, and some are old and overlooked, but useful enough to keep on hand.

The shed and the equipment in it belong to the street maintenance division within the city’s Maintenance and Operations Department. Those workers plow away snow, sand down hilly intersections, fix potholes, grade alleyways and unclog sewers. Among the city’s heavy equipment, graders get the most attention because they are the workhorses of every citywide plow out once the snow starts falling. Whenever one breaks down and needs to be repaired, it saps capacity for getting roads navigable.

In the old days, once the muni bought a new grader, Street Maintenance Manager Paul VanLandingham would promptly retire one of the older ones and send it off to auction.

“Now I keep two in the bank,” VanLandingham said inside of the warm shed, surrounded by his machines. “Essentially we have 30 ready to go, as one breaks down or whatever I’ve got a couple on the bench.”

The last two winters have been abnormally snowy and difficult for the division to handle, with early storms that landed in quick succession kicking the seasons off.

“Our ass was kicked from the get-go,” VanLandingham recalled.

Last winter, graders ran continuously as crews tried to clear back-to-back-to-back dumps.

“We worked 130 days straight last year without shutting down. That’s days and nights. And that’s weekends. So that means these graders didn’t run for two hours a day, long enough to get fuel. And then they ran and they ran and they ran,” VanLandingham said.

A lot of the division’s graders are new and high quality. But industry best practices recommend that after 10,000 hours of operation, the machine’s engine ought to be replaced or overhauled. More than half of the muni’s graders, 17 out of 30, are over that threshold. Nine more have more than 8,000 hours. The machines are terrific for the jobs they are being tasked with, VanLandingham said, but the operational tempo of recent years has pushed them to the max.

“People would kill for this type of equipment,” he said. The issue, however, is “just the amount of hours, especially the last two (winters). It’s how hard we’ve been working them.”

If several graders are down at once, it slows down the plow-out and increases the likelihood residents will not be able to drive to work, get kids to school or leave their street at all, as happened last winter. Bad or inadequate snow removal can make road conditions dangerous and damage cars.

The other large, important chunk of the fleet seeing this degree of wear and tear on its equipment is in the police department. As of 2023, 47% of APD’s vehicles had more than 100,000 miles on them. But police cars are used differently from residential vehicles, so the mileage doesn’t tell the full story. For a variety of reasons, police officers have to keep their cruisers idling almost constantly during a shift. According to Nolder, an hour of idle time is the equivalent of putting 30 miles on the engine. As an example to the Assembly at its meeting last September, Nolder said a cruiser with around 100,000 miles on it had idled for approximately 7,100 hours. Converted to equivalent mileage, that would add up to 313,000 total miles on the engine.

“Those vehicles are seeing a very hard life,” Nolder told the Assembly. “Because of that, our officers are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find a (spare) vehicle when their vehicle goes down, and that keeps them off the street.”

According to Nolder, the problem began 16 years ago when the department’s fleet budget was halved from $4.6 million to $2.3 million, in what was expected to be a temporary measure. Instead, APD’s vehicle budget remained exactly the same up until last year. That’s meant that instead of aiming to replace 10% of the fleet as cars hit their 10-year mark or reach 100,000 miles, the department is just running them down.

“Our buying power has severely diminished,” Nolder said. “As a consequence ... there is no mileage cap. We are just really running these vehicles as if we have no other choice. MOA Fleet is keeping them running, but now they spend far more time trying to get vehicles up to be able to be used, than just maintaining vehicles, just doing oil changes and doing the preventative maintenance.”

Overtaxing the fleet creates a vicious cycle. As cars wait for repairs, more strain is placed on the remaining vehicles. That additional wear makes the remaining vehicles more likely to break down. Wear accelerates. More worn-down cars require more hours of repairs and more replacement parts. Older engines are less fuel-efficient, so they require more gas. APD is at a point where many of its vehicles have had two or three times the purchase price spent on rebuilding their engines and fixing damage.

“Past a certain amount of time and they become a lot more expensive to maintain,” Nolder said.

Long-term problem, short-term solution

The city’s fleet problem is twofold. For years, the municipality has not been buying enough vehicles. Partly as a result, the backlog of deferred maintenance on the current fleet is becoming unmanageable.

“It’s definitely not a new issue,” said Assembly member Anna Brawley, whose background is as a city planner. “I think it is serious, I think it isn’t a tomorrow emergency … but you’re taking out a lot of risk.”

In Brawley’s analysis, part of how Anchorage got here is because of a mismatch in political incentives. A promise to “trim the budget” by a new mayor or Assembly member might sound great, she said, but often in practice that means a department ends up reducing costs by putting off critical maintenance. Purchasing fancy new equipment or building new facilities draws positive attention, but securing the funding for future oil changes and roof replacements isn’t quite as razzle-dazzling for voters and campaign donors.

“It’s more fun to do ribbon-cuttings,” Brawley said. “The system itself rewards new stuff and does not really reward maintenance.”

There is also, she pointed out, the issue of Anchorage’s sprawl. Because people are so spread out, both inside and beyond the Anchorage Bowl, police have to drive for miles going from one call to the next, and municipal plow operators are responsible for clearing more than a thousand lane miles of road crisscrossing the city. There is a cost to sprawl, Brawley said.

“It’s not just about money, it’s not just about the miles and the gas, it’s also about the time. We don’t think about the time cost enough,” she said.

Brawley thinks that to some degree, this is a problem money can solve. That’s partially what happened last year at APD: It got a funding boost that helped purchase $4 million worth of new vehicles.

“Fleet management is improving; however, budget constraints threaten consistent improvement and our aging fleet requires more vehicle maintenance, money and keeps officers and vehicles out of service,” former Police Chief Designee Bianca Cross wrote in the transition report.

The LaFrance administration is weighing whether to put a bond proposal before residents in April to raise money for fleet upgrades. But the specifics of that proposal, from the amount of money to whether it will target specific kinds of vehicles or services, have yet to be figured out.

“We are right now in the process of considering potential options for a ballot measure that would address some or all of our fleet needs,” Windt Pearson said.

[Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Shay Throop as the municipality’s former director of Maintenance and Operations. Throop remains in that position.]