Clark County’s vehicle maintenance team facing all-electric challenge

Clark County technicians tend to a diverse 2,608-vehicle fleet that includes cars, street sweepers and industrial-grade construction equipment inside a cavernous garage on a side street off East Flamingo Road.

The county’s fleet is the third-largest in Nevada, and the county’s workforce of some 10,000 employees taps vehicles for such tasks as responding to fires, handling building inspections, visiting foster parent homes, transporting inmates and doing road projects.

The fleet faces daunting challenges. The Automotive Services Division continues to stretch out the lifespan of vehicles several years longer than the norm with less funding. At the same time, the county’s hybrid vehicle fleet has grown, and officials anticipate that 2015 is the year that eight all-electrical cars — Chevrolet Volts — will become part of the fleet for the first time.

“We can’t shut the county down just because we have the recession,” said David Johnson, manager of automotive services.

State law requires the county to buy vehicles that rely on alternative fuels, which can be electrical, hybrid or other fuel types. To that end, the county already has a combination of hybrid vehicles and vehicles that use clean-burning diesel, reformulated gasoline and compressed natural gas. Its 609 hybrid vehicles make up the largest fleet of that type in the state. That’s up from 138 in 2006.

The move has boosted the county’s mileage efficiency. The fleet used to average 14 to 15 miles per gallon, which was that low in part because of the frequent use of gas-guzzling eight-cylinder cars such as Crown Victorias. These days, the fleet logs about 30 to 31 miles a gallon, thanks to the hybrids.

The costs vary, with government incentives affecting the costs for hybrids. The cost for a 2015 Ford Fusion is $24,516. In 2014, the cost was $25,213. Fifty-one 2014 Fusions are in the county’s fleet, and it has another 51 2013 Fusions.

The costs are uncertain, as the purchases still need to go out to bid, Johnson said. Training for technicians will be included in the contract.

The cars are also expected to keep maintenance work down. Besides using less gasoline, the Volts also don’t need the oil changes that traditional engines need.

It’s not known how many electric vehicles the county will have in the long term. Officials plan to see how the eight vehicles — and their new electrical stations — work out before making decisions about expansion. They will be assigned to the Department of Air Quality.

GETTING NEW VEHICLES

The county’s vehicle replacement dollars dried up during the Great Recession. That forced the automotive division to stretch out the life of its existing vehicles, keeping them several years longer than planned before auctioning them off.

The countywide budget for vehicle replacements hit a high of $9.1 million in fiscal year 2009, before the economy bottomed out. The next year, the county had just $1.9 million. The following year, fiscal 2010, the vehicle replacement budget was just $905,408, most of it for public works vehicles and $87,828 for the Fire Department.

This fiscal year, the county’s vehicle replacement budget is $9 million, which will be the second-highest level in the past decade. That will be used for a variety of needs, including the Fire Department, building department, department of aviation and public works.

But $9 million doesn’t meet all the county’s vehicle replacement needs, Johnson said, noting that the fleet is still behind after years of delaying vehicle replacements.

There were three years during the recession when the fleet didn’t get any money for new vehicles.

“We’re still catching up,” Johnson said. “You can’t go from one extreme to another.”

The county’s fleet is about more than cars: Technicians service public works vehicles such as street sweepers and the county detention center buses that transport prisoners.

“We continue to be behind in terms of replacing what needs to be replaced,” he said.

This year, the county’s public works crews will use 26 street sweepers — 13 from the county and 13 from the Nevada Department of Transportation — to clean up an anticipated 12 to 15 tons of trash between Mandalay Bay Road and Sahara Avenue after the New Year’s Eve celebration on the Strip.

MAINTAINING VEHICLES

The county’s Automotive Services Division has its own fund and gets paid $69 an hour for its services when other county departments bring in their vehicles.

The phrase “oil change” is avoided. Instead, they call it a “preventive maintenance inspection,” a bumper-to-bumper examination that goes well beyond changing the oil and topping off other fluids.

Its 61-item checklist includes inspecting brakes, recording the brake line thickness and checking the heating and air conditioning systems. It takes an average of about 90 minutes for a technician to complete the job. The data is entered into a computer.

The county does an average of 864 vehicle maintenance inspections a month, which is about 60 percent to 70 percent of its workload.

Fleet software tracks the vehicles, and each county department director receives a weekly report indicating vehicles due for maintenance.

The automotive division does its own welding, too.

Welder George Crossman does a variety of fixes, such as fashioning parts when they are no longer manufactured, and rebuilds street sweepers, which rust quickly because of the dirt and moisture they pull in.

Crossman said he likes the variety of his work, and he will sometimes make fixes to things besides vehicles.

For example, when a county vehicle recently backed up and damaged a sign at the Regional Justice Center, he repaired it.

Contact Ben Botkin at bbotkin@reviewjournal.com or 702-405-9781. Find him on Twitter: @BenBotkin1.