Lawrence is in desperate need to buy at least $5 million worth of new fire engines in the next two years, Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical Chief Mark Bradford told city commissioners Tuesday.

“We’re at a critical state right now,” Bradford said during a study session for the city’s 2008 budget. “They’re falling apart. We’re having a hard time keeping them on the street.”

City commissioners, though, aren’t yet ready to sound the alarm. Several commissioners said they want additional information before they are ready to commit to the major purchases.

City Commissioner Rob Chestnut said he wanted to see more hard data quantifying the condition of the city’s fire trucks before accepting the opinion that the vehicles are in immediate need of replacement.

Bradford, though, said seven of the city’s nine fire engines need to be replaced, based on a scoring system used by the city’s central maintenance garage. This is the first year the city has used the new scoring system to determine the fire engines’ condition.

Bradford said maintenance costs for the fire engines – most of which are 12 to 14 years old – have increased by 42 percent during the last four years.

Beginning last year, he said, there was an increase in downtime for many of the city’s fire engines that took them out of service for five to 10 days in many cases. That means the city has to call backup trucks into service, which creates concerns about how the city could respond to multiple emergencies.

It was unknown at Tuesday’s meeting how the purchase of new fire engines would affect the city’s mill levy. Much of that would depend on how the city would finance the new equipment. The city is exploring the annual costs of leasing the trucks versus purchasing the trucks with bonds.

The city in this year’s budget has set aside $600,000 to purchase one new piece of equipment. Bradford, though, said it would be difficult to buy a new fire engine for less than $800,000.

The fire engine requests were one of many big-ticket infrastructure items that commissioners were briefed on Tuesday. Other items included:

¢ A report from the city’s Public Works Department alerting commissioners that the department’s previous projection of $6.1 million for street maintenance likely won’t be enough. Department leaders are working on a new estimate.

City Manager David Corliss said it would be difficult to come up with additional funding for streets without a tax increase.

“I think we’re going to be challenged to do that,” Corliss said of increased funding.

¢ An update from the city’s Public Transit Department about the need to aggressively seek federal funding to purchase new buses. The city has the money to replace six of the 12 transit buses. But Cliff Galante, the city’s public transit director, said the other six buses are scheduled to exceed their recommended 350,000 mile life expectancy by the end of 2008.

The heavy-duty buses that Galante is recommending cost about $320,000 each and have a life expectancy of 500,000 miles. Federal funds can be used to pay for 83 percent of the cost of each bus, if the city can secure a congressional earmark to obtain the funding.