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Cincinnati City Council to consider allocating $1.3M to city's snow fleet, aging fire equipment and police

Cincinnati Snow Plow
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CINCINNATI — In an attempt to ease concerns about winter storm preparedness that have loomed over Cincinnati since early January, a new city council motion would allocate more than a million dollars to aging city fleets.

Cincinnati City Councilman Mark Jeffreys said he plans to introduce the motion during a public meeting on Monday, Feb. 3.

"This motion is more for us to focus internally. We have three real needs for police, fire and our (Department of Public Services) snow plow fleets," Jeffreys said. "We have $1.3 million left over from what we call the carryover ... and we need to decide how to invest that."

"Recent events have highlighted the urgent need for the City of Cincinnati to invest in its Cincinnati Fire and Department of Public Services (DPS) fleet," the motion reads. "With ~25% of (snow plow) trucks breaking down, and some that have parts that are no longer being made, we clearly have a capital need for new trucks."

The motion asks the city administration to detail to the council its specific needs for the police, fire and DPS snow fleet.

Watch Jeffreys break down the motion in the player below:

After a foot of snow left 1/4 of city's plows out of service, officials eye funding for snow, fire, police equipment

"(City administrators) would come back with those needs — a report on that — and then we would agree or disagree and say, 'Yes. We want to allocate the funds to those traceable needs,'" Jeffreys said.

Cincinnati Fire Fighters Union Local 48 President Joe Elliot is a proponent of the idea.

"We've been sounding the alarm for years. Our apparatus is aging and without immediate investments in our fleet, it puts both the public and firefighters at risk," he said.

If a portion of that funding were to be allocated to the Cincinnati Fire Department, Elliot said it would be used to purchase a new fire truck.

"I will tell you, unfortunately, a new engine — just an engine — right now, is roughly about a million dollars," Elliot said. "Lead times right now are about three years to own an engine."

Jeffreys said the Cincinnati Fire Department's fleet contains fire truck models as old as 1999 with some 500,000 miles on them.

"The financial needs of the Cincinnati Fire Department have continued to grow, but unfortunately, our funding has not kept pace," Elliot said. "We are seeing, like I said, increased call volumes, more complex emergencies and higher demand of firefighters and our resources, but yet our resources, like I said, staffing equipment, facilities, have remained stagnant."

WCPO 9 News reached out to the Cincinnati City Manager's Office for this story. A spokesperson declined to comment.