Keep on trucking: Spokane confronts issues in replacing its fire and police vehicles

At least as long as Major Eric Olsen has been in charge of the Spokane Police Department’s fleet, the city has not been keeping up with replacing its police vehicles.

“Clear back to 2017, even way back then, we were not matching the number of cars needed,” Olsen said. “We’ve been every year slipping further behind, and what that does is, the next year, it compounds.”

There are 371 vehicles in the department’s fleet, including 150 patrol cars, 84 vehicles for administrators and investigators, 81 specialty use vehicles for units like SWAT, 16 motorcycles and 40 vehicles for special events or ad hoc purposes. Dozens of patrol vehicles are used by multiple officers, some of which are swapped back and forth so frequently that the seat never really cools – called “hot seat” cars.

City policy requires that police vehicles be replaced after they’ve been driven 100,000 miles. Many people drive cars with odometers well past that mark – Olsen notes he’s still driving a truck with 176,000 miles on it – but police vehicles drive particularly hard miles, Olsen said.

“This is not a Joe Average family car where they’re driving to work and school and trips,” Olsen said. “Whether it’s chasing someone through a field or going over a curb because you’re trying to get to something important, these cars live a harder-than-normal life.”

The department drives an average of 4 million miles every year, spokeswoman Julie Humphreys said. Combined with a handful of cars that are out of service due to accidents or a number of other reasons, 44 cars need to be replaced every year simply to maintain the current fleet. Failing to do so, Olsen added, not only means the city can end up spending more to maintain a vehicle than it is worth, but it can also pose a safety hazard.

The last time the city purchased new cars was in 2022, ordering 71 Ford K8 Interceptors, a hybrid model, as well as eight electric vehicles and two Chevrolet diesel Tahoe trucks. Anticipating supply chain issues that had delayed procurement of police vehicles during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 order was meant to satisfy the department’s needs for both 2022 and 2023, falling just shy of the 44 cars per year needed to keep up with replacements.

The department was already playing catch-up, Councilman Michael Cathcart said while advocating for a larger purchase at the time.

“We need more than 200 vehicles replaced in our fleet,” Cathcart said in March 2022. “It’s concerning to me that if we don’t find a way to make this investment right now, that not only are we going to continue to be years behind where we should be, which we are now, but we’re just going to continue to kick that can down the road.”

The first of the cars ordered in 2022 arrived last week, nearly two years after they were purchased. They weren’t the cars originally ordered; the Spokane Police Department was told 25 of the Interceptors they requested couldn’t be delivered and instead ordered an equivalent number of Ford F-150 pickup trucks, Humphreys said. The remaining 46 Interceptors, which were ordered a few months later in 2022, are expected to start arriving later this year.

Spokane is at risk of falling further behind with its police fleet this year as there is no room for police vehicles in the 2024 budget drafted by former Mayor Nadine Woodward and approved by the City Council.

“There’s a possibility of finding some one-time funds out there, but this is competing against a lot of other priorities,” said Matt Boston, chief financial officer for the city.

Sustainable funding?

Before his current job with the city’s administration when he worked for the City Council, Boston was sounding the alarm that Spokane was not earmarking funds for replacing its vehicles and, facing increasingly dire deficits, had been putting off purchasing vehicles as a way to save money .

“Unfortunately, (vehicle replacement) for police and fire is one of the easiest things to pull out of a budget because it’s such a large price tag and you’re not going to see the immediate impact of it, but it has a ripple effect, and you’ve increased overall cost to the organization on an ongoing basis.”

Like the police department, the fire department should be replacing a certain number of vehicles every year, but no fire department vehicles were purchased in 2023, and there is little in the budget for an order this year, Boston said.

Mayor Lisa Brown, who criticized her predecessor Woodward on the campaign trail last year about unsustainable fiscal practices, said she was “surprised” that the city doesn’t have a dedicated process for funding vehicle purchases.

“(Police Chief Justin) Lundgren made me aware of this issue, probably the first time we met,” Brown said. “We haven’t identified where the money is coming from yet, but our goal is to come up with an idea about where to cut, and we anticipate further modifications to the budget. There is no doubt we’re behind.”

Councilman Jonathan Bingle is in favor of cutting spending at the city and dedicating more funds to vehicles for the police and fire departments.

“But we could not reduce spending enough to get ourselves onto a good annual plan for police and fire,” he added.

Bingle noted that he has called for asking voters to approve a 0.1% sales tax increase to bring in an estimated $7 million annually to fund public safety priorities, including vehicles, and had planned to put that on the ballot in 2023. He said he was pre-empted by the county, which pushed for a sales tax increase countywide to pay for new jails and other public safety initiatives. Voters rejected that ballot measure, which would have brought in an estimated $1.7 billion over 30 years.

Bingle said he’s in talks with Brown and others about another possible tax request this year. He noted that the City Council recently created an ad hoc committee to discuss a public safety levy. It hasn’t met yet.

Cathcart, however, argues that proposing a public safety levy fundamentally misleads the public and reneges on the city’s basic duties. Funding the purchase of new police and fire vehicles should be a baseline, Cathcart said. If the city can’t afford to meet that need while also funding other programs, those programs are what should be at risk, not public safety, he argued.

“It’s easier to go to voters and say, ‘Hey, please pay for cops,’ but that’s wrong,” Cathcart said. “You need to ask voters if they’re willing to pay for nice-to-haves. If voters say that’s too burdensome, you’re still funding those high-priority items, not throwing up your hands and saying, ‘Well, we don’t have enough to pay for police.’ ”