Public Services flags winter-operations, fleet and pothole staffing needs ahead of budget

Public Services Director Jerry Wilkerson told the Budget and Finance Committee that the department met residential trash-collection performance goals but faces persistent staffing and equipment shortfalls affecting street sweeping, fleet preventive maintenance and winter operations.

The presentation outlined why the department views winter response and related emergency coordination as a priority heading into the next budget cycle. Wilkerson said DPS now maintains about 1,500 road vehicles, 89 city buildings and 425 full-time equivalents, down from roughly 548 FTE two decades ago, and asked council to consider resources to modernize winter operations and expand fleet capacity.

The department’s nut graf: officials said they achieved residential-trash performance goals (less than 1% missed collections of roughly 90,000 households) but missed other targets, notably right-of-way obstruction responses (68% within 24 hours versus a 90% goal) and preventive maintenance on vehicles (about 30% completed on time against a 75% target). Wilkerson said some preventive-maintenance shortfalls reflect vehicles not arriving at the garage on schedule rather than a lack of completed work.

Committee members pressed for specifics the budget cycle can carry. Council Chair (identified in the transcript as the committee chair) and Council member Seth Walsh asked what would appear in the manager’s budget request; City Manager Cheryl Long and Assistant City Manager Kathy Bailey said the city is assembling a site working group and will produce a report with recommendations this summer. Bailey said the team is examining staffing, fleet, training, interdepartmental partnerships and technology and acknowledged some solutions — for example, new fleet vehicles — would take more than a year to deliver.

Wilkerson highlighted three service-delivery challenges: modernizing winter operations (including use of the emergency operations center and cross-departmental coordination), green-space and street-sweeping staffing, and pothole/pavement strategy. He said DPS has about 15 FTE in green-space maintenance where a 2015 consultant recommended 41 FTE, and that the sweeping program has roughly five sweeper drivers operating seven sweepers to cover about 3,100 lane miles. On potholes, Wilkerson reported supplemental crews completed more than 5,400 service requests and 37,000 pothole repairs since January 2025 but acknowledged many streets may need full repaving instead of repeated repairs.

Council members and staff also discussed tools and operational fixes. Council member Mark Jeffries and others cited low staffing compared with historical levels and recommended low-cost data and partnership pilots (Jeffries referenced using crowd-sourced mapping data) to improve pothole detection and pavement planning. The department said the new fleet-management dashboard should help track preventive maintenance and inform long-term capital replacement.

The presentation closed with immediate next steps: the city manager’s office will present a fuller assessment to council after the summer working-group review, and DPS will continue to refine performance metrics and pursue operational and staffing adjustments in the FY26 budget process.

"We are at the point now with staffing and resources that it just can't be dependent on one department to do an emergency operation," Wilkerson said, describing a cross-department approach to future snow events.

Less critical details: council approved three additional vehicles for winter operations the prior week and the department expects the new Fire Training Campus to be over 90% complete by July with a late-summer opening.