Honolulu’s transportation department has had to cut back its order of new TheHandi-Vans, desperately needed to shuttle residents with disabilities to medical appointments, grocery stores and other destinations, after agreeing to pay the local dealer substantially more than its bid price for each vehicle.

The city’s Department of Transportation Services was hoping to get 65 new paratransit vehicles by mid-2022 after awarding a $9.7 million contract to Soderholm Sales & Leasing to purchase the vehicles at an initial price of $149,377 each. But a culmination of factors, including supply chain disruptions, has led to higher prices and a long delay in getting the vans.

After protracted negotiations, DTS agreed to pay Soderholm $201,234 per vehicle, a 34% cost increase, which left only enough money to buy 48 new vans. The vans are scheduled to begin arriving in Honolulu in July, but all 48 aren’t expected to be on island until the end of the year.

Meanwhile, the number of TheHandi-Vans in service in the 207-vehicle fleet began taking a nose dive in May of last year, according to city data, as vans were taken off the road at increasing rates for maintenance, including parts replacement, or were retired due to age.

In April 2022, 90% of TheHandi-Vans, on average, were available for use. That rate has for the most part continued a rapid decline. In March, just 67% of the vehicles were on the road.

DTS Director Roger Morton told the Honolulu City Council last year that when availability drops below 80%, that’s a warning sign that something has to be done.

The situation has TheHandi-Van riders and advocates for disabled residents worried as they rely on a smaller, aging fleet.

Deb Braiman, who is blind and lives Downtown, uses TheHandi-Van three to four times a week. In recent months, she’s been left stranded, had TheHandi-Van show up an hour late as she and three other residents who are disabled waited on King Street, and was abruptly “deselected” as a rider as she tried to make it to a Christmas show. She said it seemed the paratransit service had run out of vans and later sent a car to pick her up.

Then on Thursday, the handle fell off of TheHandi-­Van she was riding in, leaving the fleet down one more vehicle.

“The (driver) brought me in from the lift, sat me down, strapped me in, went to close the door of the van and the handle fell off the outside of the van,” Braiman said. “The van is designed that if the door doesn’t close, the van doesn’t move.”

She said the very apologetic driver called in to the dispatch office. “They got a mechanic on the line who told him to just jury-rig it with some kind of belt to keep it closed, which he did,” she said.

Braiman was able to get dropped off before the van was taken in for repairs.

Another rider who is legally blind said she was stuck at a Costco for two and a half hours on a Friday this month waiting for a ride home. TheHandi-Van couldn’t handle her pick-up, she said, so her trip was routed to TheCab, a taxi company the city has employed to help handle demand as it works to restore its depleted fleet of vans. But the rider, who asked that her name not be used, said it took a long time for TheCab to find a driver who would take her.

“Everyone has a life. Just because we are disabled, yes, there are some inconveniences, but we should have fair access to transportation and get to our destination in a reasonable time,” she said.

The delays don’t happen every time, she said, “but it shouldn’t happen as much as it does.”

Broken vehicles

The city’s TheHandi-Van service has experienced a host of problems in recent years wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, a consolidation of companies supplying the vans and changes in global parts manufacturing.

Morton said one challenge is that the automobile industry has gone global in its supply chain. A lot of the parts that go into the paratransit vans require computer chips, for which there is a national shortage. Morton said that Ford, which makes the chassis for TheHandi-Vans, naturally prioritizes its highest-profit models when it comes to allocating chips. TheHandi-­Van isn’t at the top of the list.

“It hits us when we want to buy replacement parts for these vans,” he said. “The supply chain has had a tremendous impact there. For awhile we couldn’t get brake parts. If we can’t get them on schedule, those vehicles will get parked and they won’t be able to get repaired.”

On Thursday, 63 TheHandi-­­Vans were down: 14 were awaiting parts and 35 were undergoing various repairs, according to a report provided by DTS. An additional 14 vans are in too poor of a condition to be brought back into service.

Many of TheHandi-Vans are also old. More than one-third are 2014 models, the oldest year in the fleet. DTS has said in the past that TheHandi-Vans, which get heavy use, should stay on the road only five or six years but are routinely kept in service for longer.

Contract delays

The city’s fleet got a boost in 2020 with the purchase of 90 new TheHandi-­Vans. But the additional 65 vehicles that were originally supposed to have arrived about a year ago were derailed by both the pandemic and haggling over pricing with the local dealer, Soderholm Sales & Leasing.

The city’s solicitation for 65 TheHandi-Vans closed in May 2021. Soderholm had the lowest bid and was awarded the contract. But an unsuccessful protest by one of the other bidders delayed the execution of the contract to October 2021, and thus the deadline for delivering TheHandi-Vans to the end of 2022.

Then came disruptions from the pandemic. Ford shut down several of its assembly plants for prolonged periods, according to DTS. Sales of chassis’ plummeted, creating a national shortage, which delayed the time for fulfilling orders and increased prices.

In the summer of 2022, Soderholm told DTS that it couldn’t honor its bid price and sought a 15.4% increase in pricing. DTS and Soderholm differ on the details of exactly what happened next.

Gabi Soderholm is assistant operations manager for the family-run company and oversaw the contract. She blamed the city for dragging its feet on locking in a price as costs went up.

“We went in for a 15.4% increase in July 2022. We were ghosted by the city until November,” she said. “Nobody ever responded to us, replied to us.”

She said the manufacturer was holding the price for them until the end of November.

“We finally got a meeting at the end of November and we said, ‘OK, this is your last day … , this is it. We told you. I don’t know why you chose to have the meeting on the absolute last day that we could hold that measly price increase.’”

She said that the next day, the price went up 34%. She declined to disclose the company’s profit margin on the van purchases.

Morton has a different account, which he memorialized in a Dec. 19 memo that he provided to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

During the Nov. 30 meeting, according to the memo, Soderholm told DTS that it actually needed a 27% increase in pricing, not the 15.4% it had initially proffered. The next day, the company told DTS the prices went up again and that it would now need a 41% increase.

Morton’s memo said he told Soderholm the price was unacceptable and that the city would need to rebid the contract.

“I try to be a good steward of the county’s money and my first reaction was, they bid it, they should honor the price,” Morton told the Star-Advertiser. “If the prices go up after they bid it, that should be a risk that the contractor takes and the contractor bears. So yes, we took quite a bit of time to come to the conclusion that we would, in fact, negotiate for a higher price.”

Ultimately, Morton concluded it would take too long to go through the process of re-procuring TheHandi-Vans, and agreed to a 34% price increase. Another prolonged delay could result in having “to take drastic steps” to deny rides to some groups of riders because of a lack of capacity, according to the memo. Morton said the department’s own due diligence had also shown that prices for paratransit vehicles had indeed gone up substantially and that if the contract was rebid the city could end up paying even more.

He said that agreeing to the 34% price increase wasn’t popular among everyone in his office.

“Some of my staff felt that (the Soderholms) were being unreasonable,” he said. “What I believe was that we were both caught up in a rapidly increasing price situation that neither of us really had any hand in doing and we were just victims of circumstances.”

In the meantime, Morton said DTS has been doing its best to provide additional rides. It’s currently bidding new contracts with other taxi and transportation companies to help with demand and has issued a new solicitation for SUVs that can assist riders who do not rely on a wheelchair or other mobility device.