Substantial vehicle purchases recommended for MLSD

MOSES LAKE — The Moses Lake School District should start buying some vehicles, not just buses but also work trucks and vans, district officials said during the Moses Lake School Board meeting Thursday.

“The moral of the story is that (the district’s transportation fleet) is aging,” said Jeremy O’Neil, the district’s chief operations officer. “Investments need to happen.”

Transportation director Tim Fought said some of the gap is the consequence of the district’s rapid growth.

“We grew faster than our fleet could grow,” he said.

O’Neil showed a picture of a district maintenance vehicle that’s been on the road for more than 20 years.

“When I asked the team who’s dependent on this (vehicle) day in and day out, there’s a sense of pride that we have frugality as one of the core tenets of how we do our business. Sometimes frugality gets to an extreme, which we have to manage,” O’Neil said.

The district has 89 school buses, 35 maintenance vehicles and 10 vans or SUVs that are used to transport small groups of students, he said.

Typically a district has a bus and vehicle purchase schedule, using its state-funded depreciation allowances to offset some of the costs for school buses. The MLSD has that schedule, but didn’t follow it in some years. As a result the district has gotten behind, he said.

“We don’t get any funding for those buses that are older than 13 years,” he said.

It will, he said, take a while to catch up.

“This is going to be a 10-plus year endeavor,” he said.

O’Neil estimated the district would have to buy six or seven school buses per year, five work trucks per year and one or two vans or SUVs for student transport per year. At least that would be the recommended goal.

“This is aspirational,” he said.

District officials also will have to find ways to pay for them.

“Presently we don’t have defined funding for these, so we’re going to have to figure out where in the budget to fund these projects,” he said.

Board chair Kevin Fuhr asked about the purchase of newer used vehicles to replace some of the work trucks that dated to the 1990s. Fought said that has its own challenges, and cited his experiences looking for used cars earlier in the week. He spent half a day going to various dealers in Tri-Cities and didn’t find much, he said, due to high demand.

“Even the used market is hard right now,” he said. “Everybody is buying up the used vehicles.”

“We’re trying to get a game plan together for replacement,” Fought added. “Something that we can put together now that we can work long-term with.”

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.