By Peter Sachs / The Bulletin
Published: September 08. 2007 4:00AM PSTTwo of the six blue buses that Bend purchased from Transit Sales International last year sit idle and with some parts removed at the city's Pilot Butte public works campus Friday. Three of the six are permanently out of service.
A memo written by a city diesel mechanic, who inspected the six used buses being purchased for Bend Area Transit, shows that he found a host of problems with them and did not think they were worth buying. The mechanic inspected the buses before they were delivered to Bend, which indicates that some officials knew there were problems with them before they were put to use.
“All buses in very poor shape with numerous repairs of all kinds”
“If it were up to me I would not buy the buses. She said why not? I said because they were a piece of junk”
“I told him the buses were all junk, very corroded underneath”
“I was never told I had the authority to say yes or no on purchasing the buses”
A city of Bend mechanic who inspected six used buses in Southern California last summer labeled them “all junk” and tried to back out of the purchase, according to a memo.
But the city bought the buses and used them as the backbone of its new transit system anyway. They soon started breaking down, requiring tens of thousands of dollars in repairs, and are no longer in regular use.
The Bulletin obtained the memo Friday following a public records request. The memo was written by diesel mechanic Dave Pierce, a city employee.
It shows that some city officials knew the buses had serious maintenance issues even before they got to Bend. Several months after the launch of Bend Area Transit on Sept. 27, 2006, myriad problems with the six ElDorado Transmark buses began to surface publicly .
“The significance is that the city had the right to reject the buses at the time Dave Pierce made his inspection,” city attorney Jim Forbes said.
But Pierce didn’t reject them because “I was never told I had the authority to say yes or no on purchasing the buses ,” the memo states.
The Bend City Council approved buying the buses in late June 2006 after little discussion. Pierce inspected them within a matter of weeks before they were delivered to the city . This February, after months of maintenance woes, the city sued Transit Sales International, the bus reseller.
Pierce traveled to Riverside, Calif., in late July 2006 to inspect the buses at TSI’s bus lot. The record of an inspection of the buses, which is dated Aug. 2, 2006, listed dozens of problems.
It is unclear exactly when Pierce wrote the memo. The top of the memo reads “Date — end of August or 1st of Sep.” Forbes said it was written after the city received the buses but before November 2006. The buses were in Bend at least by Aug. 31, 2006, when a Bulletin photo showed officials riding in one on a test run .
Pierce’s two-page handwritten note starts out saying, “All buses in very poor shape with numerous repairs of all kinds.”
Pierce wrote in the memo that he tried to tell a TSI representative “if it were up to me I would not buy the buses.” But the employee told him that the buses had already been bought and painted, and therefore it was too late to back out.
“This is a case of a long series of falsehoods that were told to the city by TSI and what they told Dave Pierce is yet another falsehood,” Forbes said.
Upon his return to Bend, Pierce wrote, he received a call at home from “Glenn,” an apparent reference to Glenn Crawford, a maintenance supervisor in the city’s Public Works Department. Pierce described the problems, including widespread corrosion on the bus undercarriages due to road salt.
Crawford thought that Public Works Director Ken Fuller should be informed of Pierce’s findings, the memo suggested.
“(Crawford) asked if Ken Fuller could call me at home to talk to me, I said sure,” the memo states. “But Ken never called.”
Pierce was not at work Friday and could not be reached for comment . Fuller and Crawford both declined to discuss the memo because city attorney Forbes told them not to comment.
Bend Area Transit Manager Heather Ornelas did not return repeated calls seeking comment Friday. City Manager Andy Anderson was on vacation and unavailable for comment, his assistant said.
A string of problems
Currently, all six of the buses are out of service. Three have serious issues that are unlikely ever to be fixed, officials said last month. The other three buses have air conditioners that are too weak for Bend’s summer heat.
For weeks, BAT has been running its fixed routes using smaller buses, many of which the city had used for its Dial-A-Ride service. The city purchased two brand-new, smaller buses this summer that are also being used on the fixed-route system.
The troubled history of Bend’s blue buses started in early 2006 . Following a winter directive from the City Council to get a bus system up and running by September 2006, city officials found the six buses in a used bus lot in Southern California.
The Utah Transit Authority in Salt Lake City used the buses for nine years before mothballing them because of recurring maintenance issues. In late 2005, UTA sold the buses to TSI for less than $1,800 each.
On June 21, 2006 , the City Council unanimously agreed to spend about $222,000 on buying the fleet and having it delivered to Bend. At the end of July, the city sent Pierce to inspect the buses, and they were in Bend by the end of August. Eighty percent of the cost of the buses was paid for with a federal grant.
Fixed-route service started on Sept. 27, 2006, with more than 1,000 people riding the buses on the first day. City officials have predicted that the system will have served at least 250,000 riders by the time its one-year anniversary rolls around this month.
In December, officials conceded that they were having more maintenance issues than expected with the buses. City Purchasing Manager Bob Griffith told The Bulletin at that time that the mechanic had been told he “didn’t have any choice but to accept” the buses after inspecting them. Griffith would not comment in December on whether Pierce found any maintenance issues with the buses.
In fact, the buses had plenty of problems.
One page of the Aug. 2 inspection report shows 33 different concerns. The city was only able to provide one page of the roughly 20-page report Friday because it is not organized in one location, Forbes said.
That one page includes itemized notations on the six buses from seemingly minor concerns like “left wiper arm erratic” to more serious issues like “exhaust flex pipe lying on coolant,” “exhaust leak next to coolant hose” and “hole in floor and ceiling.”
On Feb. 9, the city sued TSI over the sale of the buses.
The $254,000 suit also provided details into the city’s claim that someone had tampered with the odometers on the buses. When TSI bought the buses from UTA, the suit claimed, their mileage varied from between about 286,000 miles and roughly 348,000 miles. But when the buses got to Bend, one odometer was 60,000 miles below true mileage and another was 40,000 miles lower than its true mileage . Put another way, the actual mileage on the buses was 33 percent higher than what the city had initially been told last summer when it was looking into the buses.
On Thursday, the city filed a motion seeking a settlement conference, which would bring both sides to the table with a judge to hash out an agreement without a trial.
Councilors react
On the day the city sued TSI earlier this year, officials convened a press conference, blasting the bus company.
Then-City Councilor John Hummel raged that the city had been “victimized by criminals and corrupt business people,” The Bulletin reported at the time.
“Transit Sales International ripped the taxpayers of Bend off and this city and this City Council is going to do everything in our power to make sure that the taxpayers of Bend are made whole,” said Hummel, who has since left the council.
But councilors did not learn until recently about Pierce’s memo. It sparked mixed reactions among some of them Friday.
Councilor Bill Friedman has ardently defended the purchase of the buses, even in light of their maintenance issues. Though he said he had heard about the contents of the memo, Friedman said he had not read it. He could not recall how long he had known about the memo.
“We have provided a huge service,” Friedman said. “Having those buses here made that program begin and that program has been an enormous help to the residents of the community.”
But Councilor Chris Telfer, who publicly questioned buying used buses more than a year ago, said she was “appalled” after learning about the memo earlier this week. She said she had not read a copy of it.
“I think we did a bad job of due diligence and I don’t think our actions are defensible ,” she said.
She said that the memo is giving her added motivation to push for internal audits of how the city’s staff functions.
“I’ve been harping for internal audits for five years now and I’ve just been getting stonewalled all along,” Telfer said. “This just makes we want to get a little bit more aggressive in requesting some sort of internal audits.”
But Friedman put the bulk of the blame squarely on TSI.
“Maybe they made the wrong choice in buses at the staff level,” Friedman said. “It is clear that there was a difference of opinion, and our opinion is that we were more or less bait-and-switched.”
A History of Bus Troubles
1996: The Utah Transit Authority buys six new ElDorado Transmark buses for service in the Salt Lake City area.
2005: UTA retires the buses from service earlier than usual because of serious recurring maintenance problems.
Fall 2005: UTA sells the buses to Transit Sales International, in Riverside, Calif., for about $1,800 each.
Spring 2006: Bend officials find the six Transmark buses at TSI’s facility.
June 2006: Bend Transit Manager Heather Ornelas views the Transmark buses while on a business trip in Southern California.
June 21, 2006: A presentation to the Bend City Council shows that the city looked at buses from two transit districts in Oregon, a Portland bus sales company and TSI. The total cost of the six Transmark buses from TSI, including delivery and $45,000 in new parts, was to be about $222,000. The purchase of the Transmark buses was unanimously approved.
Late July 2006: City diesel mechanic Dave Pierce inspects the buses in Riverside. He described them as “all junk” in a memo but was told the city had to purchase them because they were already repainted.
Sept. 27, 2006: The city launches Bend Area Transit, its first fixed-route system . More than 1,000 people ride the buses in the first day.
Dec. 15: The Bulletin reports that the city had amassed $71,000 in maintenance expenses on the six buses. Records obtained by The Bulletin show several odometer readings tens of thousands of miles off between when the buses left Salt Lake City and when they were sold to Bend.
Feb. 9: The city sues TSI, claiming the company defrauded it of $256,000 and that someone had tampered with the bus odometers.
March: One of the six buses is retired by the city after major engine failure.
May: A second blue bus is taken out of service permanently over another problem.
August: A third blue bus has a tire blowout during training, damaging part of the side of the bus and taking it out of service permanently.
Aug. 28: City officials admit that the three remaining functional buses are out of service, citing summer temperatures and weak air conditioning systems. It uses smaller buses to keep the system running.
Sept. 6: The city moves to settle its lawsuit against TSI.
Peter Sachs can be reached at 617-7837 or psachs@bendbulletin.com.
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