Crookston Public Schools held an open hour bus garage tour of their current facility Thursday afternoon ahead of the referendum meeting. The bus garages sit on a block that borders downtown and a residential neighborhood meaning it’s a tight fit that has resulted in several cars being hit over the years. The tour highlighted the daily challenges in the current facility and the risk of a catastrophic incident to the district’s bus fleet.
It’s easy to see why Transportation Coordinator Rick Niemala is concerned about a catastrophic building failure putting the district’s buses out of commission with a sagging roof, support beams leaning heavily and the garage walls bowing out. Niemala said the current buildings have served their usefulness. “They’ve served their usefulness,” said Niemala. “We should get them replaced before something catastrophic happens, and we lose a fleet of buses. That’s not something you replace overnight. You just don’t run down to the dealer and pick them up. It’s a real big concern. Especially after last winter where we broke rafters in the big garage. They get enough damage to the buses just backing them in and out of there.”
The new model of buses also creates a challenge in that they are taller than buses used to be. To fit them into the shop, Niemala says the school needs to purchase air suspensions and other low profile accessories to decrease the height of the buses to get them inside the shop. “With the new style bus, they raised the headroom about 3 inches here about seven years ago,” said Niemala. “Our beams are at 120 inches. They won’t [fit] unless you let the air out of the suspension. So then you are spending an extra $2,500-3,500 on the air suspension. And then you have to order it with low profile tires, low profile roof hatches, low profile strobe light. There is a moisture fan they put on the front of them now, and we can’t even consider that because it sticks up about six inches and wouldn’t be able to come into this one we do all the maintenance and washing in.”
The shop is also located in an area that is subject to flooding if with enough snowmelt or rain, resulting in flooding of the shop, offices and break room. “If you get rainfall of two inches an hour or more for a duration generally the storm sewer won’t take it,” said Niemala. “It comes up and in through the door to flood the offices, break room, and the shop floor. It’s into the office spaces, and it’s always muddy. When you come to work, you spend the first three hours washing all the mud out of the shop before you can start working.”
Besides the buses needing to be plugged in to start in temperatures below 10 degrees, Niemala said there are several reasons to have a bus garage instead of parking outside. “For one, the paint doesn’t fade,” said Niemala. “The outside moisture causes them to deteriorate as far as rust. Mechanically you put a lot more time and money into them when they are sitting outside all the time. Even in a cold storage garage like this, you don’t fog up or frost the windows. If you are sitting outside in the wintertime, you’re going to warm them up for an hour or more to get enough heat in them so you can see to go. You have to have electricity to get them started. That’s part of Minnesota winters. They will last longer when in the shed and it’s a little easier for the drivers to get them going in the morning.”
Niemala also estimates that the life of the buses, currently twelve years, would drop to about nine years without adding additional maintenance expenses. “You’d probably be looking at getting two every year,” said Niemala. “Right now, it’s 1-2-1. It would probably be two every year because you’d see that much quicker deterioration or that much more expense in the upkeep of them. You’d lose about three years of life on [the buses] on average.”
The current garages create several space issues. Niemala said it would be nice to have extra shop space so they can keep all the buses inside when doing repairs. “We need more shop space too,” said Niemala. “We also work on the Red Lake Falls school district buses. When everything has to be packed in a certain order, it doesn’t fit at the end of the day. It would be nice to have a little more space in the shop area in case you don’t get finished today, and it can stay there. Currently, we’ve got a couple parked outside because we don’t have enough space for our stuff.”
The third garage building also has its challenges with three rows of buses, and just one door said Niemala. “As we get over to the steel shed here where we keep the trip buses it becomes a drivers test to get them in because we have one door and three rows of buses,” said Niemala “There is a lot of back and forth jockeying to get everything, and then it’s a few feet short, so when you have the bus, and the trailer hooked up to it you have to have a shorter bus to get the door closed. Everything has a place and has to be in the right place, or it doesn’t fit.”
