Photo courtesy Monmouth County
By Philip Sean Curran
Monmouth County freeholders spent around $7 million to build a hangar-sized garage at the county’s public works complex on Center Street in Freehold Township, where large trucks and other government-owned equipment will be repaired.
County officials gathered Oct. 21 for a ribbon-cutting ceremony inside a building that, at 220 feet long and 120 feet wide, gives staff more room to work. The facility can hold 36 vehicles at a time, with the 16-foot-high doors big enough to fit a fire truck or salter spreader through. Those vehicles and other heavy equipment can be fully raised off the ground, to the point that mechanics can stand underneath them.
“Now just imagine how high that is up there compared to our past building,” said Thomas A. Arnone, freeholder director, referring to a large truck sitting on a lift behind him. “Well, that wasn’t able to be done to that level.”
Instead, staff in the fleet services of the county’s public works department would have to work outside, regardless of the elements, to fix vehicles so they could get them back on the road, he said.
“But at the end of the day, we looked at that and was that a way to show our support to our employee base by having them do that?” Arnone asked.
The answer turned out to be “no.”
The county broke ground on the garage in August 2018, an item of curiosity in the community.
“People in the township would say, ‘What was that?’” Freehold Mayor Barbara J. McMorrow said at the ribbon-cutting. “And I’d go, ‘Well, the county’s building a garage.’ And people are thinking a garage that you put your cars in. And when they see what this is, this really is the 21st century come to Monmouth County in Freehold Township.”
The garage, officially known as the heavy equipment maintenance building, opened this week. There are no grease stains on the floor, no smell of car fluids in the air – at least not yet.
Fleet services, made up of about 33 employees, plays a critical role for county government, especially in bad weather, another county official said.
“During a snow operation, there’s roughly 125 dump trucks running on the road. At any given time, you’re going to have breakdowns on what you’re pushing those trucks to do,” said John W. Tobia, director of public works and engineering.
Mike McIntyre, the assistant supervisor of heavy equipment maintenance, said the garage provides employees more room to work. He said it gives “the ability to put a vehicle in the air and do the job safer than we ever were able to do it before.”
The older garage, located directly across from the new one, was not big enough for staff to jack up cars and trucks.
“In a snow storm, they’d be laying out in the snow repairing dump trucks,” Tobia said. “It was so tight in there with vehicles being taken apart. I mean, you were literally intermingling the parts from vehicles and mechanics’ tools.”
Aside from the 1,100 vehicles and roughly 900 pieces of other equipment the county owns, Monmouth also has shared services agreements with local communities, including arrangements to fix their vehicles.
“And this one is a vital, vital part of our shared services because of the cost savings that it gives a lot of our municipalities,” Arnone said of an arrangement that makes the county money.
One of those partnerships is with the Asbury Park Fire Department. Battalion fire chief Raymond DiLello spoke of the importance of keeping his department’s vehicles on the road.
“It’s a monumental task,” he said. “And it’s usually just a phone call away to one of the mechanics or the shop or the directors. And I’ve never been turned down. I’ve never been disappointed.”
“I think we’re running a state-of-the-art operation,” said Chuck Harden, the county supervisor of garage services. “And we need a facility to back that up.”
