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googles
This is talking about school busses, but I'd assume that they're pretty much the same:
https://www.busboss.com/blog/school-bus-maintenance-an-analysis-of-costs
The article did say that they were older, but it sounds like the maintenance expenditure on the prison busses is 3x to 4x that.
The money isn't the problem. It's people skimming off the top of the prison industry that are the problem.
A business lease and insurance on an F150 is going to run you around 10-20k a year.
Maybe. If they're spending 3x to 4x and have less than a quarter of the fleet functioning, that does seem like a kind of large discrepancy. I'd kind of want to see what the correlation with age is, and the bus age.
That might be true, but the $1.2m to $1.6m per year figure is maintenance, which is a different expense from financing on the bus or insurance; they shouldn't be directly comparable. Someone isn't going to average $10-20k a year on maintenance for an F150 (or at least I'd hope they aren't).
EDIT: apparently this has been an ongoing problem. This article says that availability was down to close to 60% in 2022.
https://laist.com/news/criminal-justice/nearly-40-of-lasd-jail-buses-are-out-of-service-and-some-incarcerated-people-are-missing-court-dates
It also has the name of the company that does the maintenance; it's apparently not a part of the sheriff's office.
They interviewed a mechanic that chalked it up to COVID-19:
The Sheriff's Department said that the problem was that it hadn't bought new busses for five years:
But my point is, somehow in two years, they apparently went from a little over 60% availability, which was considered a newsworthy concern then, to something like 7% at the nadir to apparently 28% now.
I don't think that matters, because it's not an excuse. If the buses are expensive to maintain because they're old, then the negligence or corruption simply stems from failing to replace the buses in a timely fashion instead of failing to maintain them. Either way, the people in charge are to blame.