You may soon see a new lift truck driving around town.
Forest Park village commissioners approved the purchase of a 2024 Ford F-550 aerial lift truck for $173,119 at the Aug. 11 village council meeting. Sal Stella, director of public works, estimates that the truck will be delivered by the end of this week or early next.
Stella says his department’s current lift truck has been in the shop for the last three months, where workers can’t get it to start.
“It literally works year-round, between cutting down and trimming trees, hanging light pole and event banners, and any other kind of aerial work that we have to do,” Stella told the Review.
The department’s current 2004 Ford F-450 lift truck has had tens of thousands of dollars of electric and hydraulic repairs over the past few years, and it’s barely passing annual inspections, according to Stella. While the public works department has been without it, they’ve been renting a truck from Runnion Equipment, the same company they’re buying the truck from. Runnion is giving the village a $4,500 discount on the new truck and waiving its rental fees of $1,500 a week over the last three months.
The new lift truck will improve the safety and efficiency of the public works department, whose staffers can now be “confident it’s not going to fail on you when you’re 45 feet up in the air,” Stella said. “Safety’s a concern and reliability’s a concern.”
During discussion for the agenda item at the council meeting, Commissioner Michelle Melin-Rogovin supported the purchase of the lift truck.
“I appreciate the investment in this vehicle because, as we’ve discussed and invested in the safety and well-being of our village crew, the current workarounds that we have are less than optimal,” Melin-Rogovin said.
Also during discussion, Commissioner Jessica Voogd recalled a heavy storm a few months ago, when she called Stella to check in on damage from fallen trees and branches around town. She said Stella responded that it was minimal and better than other surrounding communities.
“The investments that we’ve been making over the years in our Urban Forestry Management Plan, in the vehicles and equipment and stuff that they need, we are seeing a return on that investment,” Voogd said. “We’re seeing improved quality of our trees and less of these unknown variable conditions, where limbs are coming down or trees are coming down just because we don’t know what shape they are in and we’re not taking care of them.”
In 2021, Forest Park got a matching grant from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to help finance the Urban Forestry Management Plan. It funded the inventory of 3,335 trees and an outline for how to maintain them, and plant more, over the next several years.
Stella said the village will update that inventory every five years to keep track of which trees need to come down and when. He added that, with high-wind storms in the Chicagoland area on Aug. 11 and 12, Forest Park didn’t see any fallen trees.
But that wasn’t always the case. After working for the public works department for 28 years, Stella said storms like that in past years would’ve caused four or five trees to come down.
“Luckily, now we don’t see that. Every once in a while, but that’s about it,” he said.
The public works department still needs a new chipper truck — the box truck that tows the chipper used to cut up tree branches and logs around the village. The chipper truck is also used year-round, for brush pickup twice a week and for tree pickup after Christmas.
Stella said the department’s current chipper truck is from 1999.
“It has internal engine problems, where it emits horrible black smoke anytime you hit the accelerator and has bad oil leaks that can’t be fixed because it’s an internal engine issue,” Stella said.
Stella hopes to get a new chipper truck within the next six months. He said the village needs to replenish some of the money in its vehicle replacement program’s Motor Fuel Tax fund before buying the new truck.
