MV DPW UPDATE: Sanitation Sabotage: Half of Fleet Down with No Parts to Fix Broken Trucks
Consequence of Comptroller’s Failure to Pay Bills
(Thursday, February 28, 2019) Due to Comptroller Deborah Reynolds’ refusal to pay the City’s bills, vendors who supply the Department of Public Works with crucial parts that are necessary to keep Mount Vernon’s aging fleet operational have cut the City off. Without these parts and supplies, DPW mechanics cannot perform critical repairs, which means when trucks go down, they stay down.
Today, eight of the DPW’s 17 sanitation trucks (virtually half the fleet) are out of commission. Mount Vernon owes $257,066 to 13 parts vendors and some of those unpaid bills date to last April.
The inability to repair garbage trucks has affected collection throughout the City. This is how the DPW is responding:
- In order to collect the garbage and the recycling with the trucks that are running, DPW has to put employees on second shifts each day, which means the city has to pay overtime.
This extra cost to the taxpayer is not only avoidable, it’s unsustainable.
In addition to the added costs, the steady rate of overtime is tolling on the men and women of the DPW. The DPW cannot afford to risk exhausting the workforce in the face of potential winter storms.
Two of the DPW’s five street sweepers are also down. The vendor that services the sweepers told the Garage Superintendent Edgar Torres that they want to work with the DPW, but the cannot perform any more services or supply any more parts until a substantial payment is made on the DPW’s account.
These vendors have a right feel fed up.
In November, Vincent Emilio of DB Hydraulics, a company that has been doing business with Mount Vernon for more than 50 years, said he was planning to take the City to court because he can’t get the Comptroller to pay bills dating back to July.
It would be less expensive to buy new garbage trucks than to keep fixing the old ones.
A new garbage truck would cost an estimated $240,000, according to a recent price quote. Over a 10-year repayment plan, the monthly cost of a new truck ends up being about $2,000.
The DPW is spending thousands more than that a month to fix the old trucks! For example, the cost of a worn out or damaged diesel exhaust filter is $3,400, one of many common replacement parts on a 10-year-old-plus truck.
Below are three videos.
The first is a video of DPW Commissioner Mark Ederer, DPW Supervisor Joey Carretta, and Garage Superintendent Edgar Torres speaking on the current state of the DPW’s sanitation fleet and the DPW’s extraordinary efforts to fix vehicles and get the work done, despite being cut off by virtually all parts and service vendors for non-payment.
The second is a PowerPoint presentation from Deputy DPW Commissioner Kirk Allison on the financial impact of the unpaid bills and a cost-benefit analysis of the overtime costs involved.
The third is a video of Comptroller Reynolds telling DPW Garage Superintendent Edgar Torres that he is “just a worker.”
The City of Mount Vernon v. Deborah Reynolds Lawsuit: http://bit.ly/mvsuescomp
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