MIAMI VALLEY — Fire Departments across the Miami Valley have been waiting for years for new fire trucks that are often too expensive.
It’s forcing many departments to change how they buy trucks to get them sooner.
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News Center 7’s Cody Butler spoke with multiple departments about the issue.
The changes Springfield made saved the city a million dollars.
Springfield’s fire chief told us they like to spec out their own trucks straight from the factory.
When they went to buy a new ladder truck, it came with a $2 million price tag and more than a year’s wait.
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Time and money the department didn’t have.
“We searched high and low all across the country,” said Chief Jacob King, Springfield Fire Department.
Springfield’s new ladder truck station isn’t new.
It was bought used from a fire department in Pennsylvania.
“It’s just like going to buy a used car; you’re kind of on the hook, right, if it doesn’t work out,” King said.
The bigger problem is that it is taking a year or more to get a new truck delivered.
Chief King said a new ladder truck would have set the department back $2.2 million.
The used one they received, which has features Springfield’s never had, only cost $1 million.
“We knew that you know, our community wasn’t ready to engage,” King said. “In that level of costs and so we had to come up with an alternative strategy.”
“It was more important for us to evaluate what can our community afford, what can they support, and how can we best stretch those tax dollars,” said Katie Eviston, Springfield Finance Director.
Now, fire departments are facing another problem: the price of used trucks is also going up.
“There’s only so many used trucks,” said Jon Harvey with the Ohio Association of Professional Firefighters. “And again, if you’re buying a used truck and they’re emergency vehicles.”
Riverside just spent nearly a million dollars for a new fire engine.
It took 18 months to get the basic truck from the factory.
“It’s just a simple spec which speeds the building process up,” said Chief Mark Miller of the Riverside Fire Department.
Chief Miller said he expects this truck to last more than 20 years.
He said in order to afford it, they didn’t order everything that was on the truck it is replacing.
“For us, it’s what are the bare minimums that we need to where before you would spec the latest and greatest in all the safety enhancements you could get on a truck,” Miller said. “It’s a shell game. We saved up for two years to make this purchase.”
Riverside is already looking ahead to future needs and finding ways to pay for it now.
Congress is looking at the issue too.
Right now, there are only three major companies making fire trucks in the U.S., and they haven’t increased production.
“I think one of the other things it does is buys us time, right, to find out what’s going to happen in the congressional hearings with regards to the fire truck manufacturers, the buying up of them, the rapid increase in costs, and then that delay in the build times,” King said.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to see some of the better build times and potentially a reduction in the overall cost,” he said.
It’s still not clear what Congress will do to lower prices for these lifesaving pieces of equipment.
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