Some 3,500 residents living with disabilities rely on well-maintained Handi-Vans to get around Oahu every day, but a spate of challenges to the city’s bid requests for new vehicles has prevented the replacement of dilapidated vans for more than two years.

The holdup has forced transit officials to ratchet up their repairs of the aging 162-van fleet. It has also cut into the effort to improve Handi-Van service amid years of customer complaints.

“The fleet is too old and the maintenance needs of the fleet strain our ability to serve the community,” Michael Formby, director of the city Department of Transportation Services, said in an email Wednesday.

Since the last time the city purchased new Handi-Vans, in 2010, four legal protests have blocked attempts to replenish the fleet. Three of those four protests were filed by Soderholm Sales & Leasing, the Honolulu-based company that has provided Handi-Vans since 1994.

Formby and officials at Oahu Transit Services Inc., the organization that runs the city’s Handi-Van fleet, hope to catch up on the backlog by adding 99 new vans in 2014. But revelations this week of a fourth protest against the city — this time by a different, undisclosed company against an award issued to Soderholm — could push those vans’ delivery back further. The city has not yet made the details of any of the protests public.

“The whole thing is a debacle,” said Erik Soderholm, Soderholm Sales & Leasing’s vice president.

“They’re totally off-track. They should be replacing 20 to 30 a year,” he said.

According to Soderholm, recent employee turnover at the transportation department has led to unqualified staffers writing shoddy and error-laden bid proposals for vans, sparking legal protests (including his own) and grinding the procurement of new vans to a halt.

The transportation department should have an engineer on staff who can better monitor the bid specifications, ensuring they’re problem-free before they go out, Soderholm added.

Formby said he’s met with Soderholm on the matter, but he didn’t know whether the vendor’s concerns hold any merit because he took on the director’s job in January as part of Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s incoming administration.

But after Soderholm started protesting, the transportation department ceded much of its oversight for bid specs to the Department of Fiscal Service’s procurement office, Formby said. The procurement office has “taken a more active role” to make sure the specs are “tight” going forward, he added.

In the past several years, Soderholm has challenged awards to other vendors in complaints to the city and the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs. 

He said that department in 2010 ruled in his favor that the city’s bid specs were problematic and needed to be changed. Commerce department records available online show only more recent hearings during which department officers ruled in the city’s favor. No records of any 2010 ruling were available from the department’s staff Friday.

In documents filed with the city, the commerce department and U.S. District Court, Soderholm argued that the city broke state law by allowing companies that weren’t licensed to sell buses in Hawaii to bid on the Handi-Vans. The city, on the other hand, asserted in an April 2011 request for Handi-Van bids that federal laws governing the Handi-Van purchases exempted bidders from the state’s licensing law. 

U.S. District Judge Oki Mollway dismissed a Soderholm suit to stop the bids in February 2012 for lack of jurisdiction, stating there was no "live case or controversy" to consider.

The oldest Handi-Vans in the fleet have been in service since 2002. About 80 percent of the fleet has exceeded its “minimum service life,” or the number of years that a van purchased with federal dollars has to stay in service for the city to avoid financial penalties. Most of the fleet has a minimum service life of five years, according to a fleet roster provided by Oahu Transit Services.

“You can do a lot with a vehicle for a long time,” but at a certain point it doesn’t justify the cost to keep making repairs, Oahu Transit President and General Manager Roger Morton said. As the vans have gotten older, with many of them requiring their engines to be rebuilt, Oahu Transit has begun a strict preventive maintenance regimen, Morton said. “It has paid off big time,” he added.

Previously Oahu Transit kept an average of about 40 vans out of service each day for maintenance but in recent months it trimmed that number to between 16 and 25, Morton said. That’s a satisfactory number based on the fleet’s size, he added.

Ideally, Morton said, the city would purchase 25 to 30 new Handi-Vans each year. However, in the past decade Handi-Van procurement has been inconsistent, with new vehicles sometimes being purchased every other year or every three years instead.

In 2011, two Handi-Vans caught fire as they were driven on the highway. The vans were not carrying passengers, Morton said, and Oahu Transit determined the fires were caused by short-circuits between the alternator and the car battery, brought on by “metal fatigue” in a bracket in the older vans.

Those brackets have all been replaced, Morton said. Vehicle wear-and-tear helped spark the fires but so did vehicle design, he said. “We worry about all safety issues,” Morton said. “It’s just a law of physics. Things will wear over time.”

Meanwhile, Handi-Van customers, already frustrated by frequent tardiness and scheduling issues, say they also see the fleet’s age is starting to affect service.

“They’re definitely showing age,” said Milton Kubo, vice chairman of Citizens for a Fair ADA Ride, an advocacy group that meets quarterly to discuss Handi-Van and bus issues with transit officials. “The lifts are starting to break.”

The added repairs and maintenance to keep old vehicles is only a “Band-Aid” for the problem, added Donald Sakamoto, the group’s chairman. Early last week, when transportation director Formby told Sakamoto that another company has protested the city’s decision to award the latest to bid to Soderholm, Sakamoto said his heart sank. “We’ve been waiting too long and too patiently for this thing,” he said.

In the short term, getting 99 new Handi-Vans will improve the city’s Handi-Van service, Formby said.

But in the long term, as those vans age, “that could be an issue,” and the city will have to work to get back on track acquiring 20 to 30 new vans each year to ensure stability.