At the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area, where off-road enthusiasts are welcome and park authorities have arresting powers, there’s a high premium on specialty vehicles that can quickly, but safely, maneuver through sandy terrain.
Enter the Funco “Big 5,” a custom dune buggy employed by California State Parks to keep up with even the most powerful consumer recreational vehicles. It also provides emergency response and rescue to the park’s most hard-to-reach areas. And it’s been drawing criticism recently, mostly from people who feel it was an expensive purchase that’s not worth the ongoing expense of repairs.
Equipped with a removable gurney to transport accident victims, seating for five rangers, and the capacity to tow 800 pounds, the buggy’s capabilities go above and beyond those of other types of vehicles employed by the agency.
“The public out there has equipment that has much more capable performance than our standard pickup truck,” Oceano Dunes Superintendent Andrew Zilke said. “You get people who might try to flee the scene of an incident or escape. Pickups can’t keep up with those folks, but the sand rail does.”
The buggy also has its limitations. It wasn’t designed to be a daily driver and can’t be used on the highway, so it can’t provide backup to rangers in other parts of the park. It doesn’t have a turbocharged engine, either, as some media reports have suggested, Zilke said. The buggy has met all of the department’s needs, he added.
“It’s definitely something that people pay attention to,” he said. ”It’s such an agile and mobile piece of equipment that it has really curtailed [crime] when it has been deployed for high-speed evasions.”
State Parks purchased the buggy in 2002 with money from the Oceano Dunes OHV Trust Fund, created primarily from gas taxes from OHVs used at Oceano’s State Vehicular Recreation Area, registrations, and the park’s entrance fees. The vehicles use, however, has drawn criticism from people—including the buggy’s manufacturer—who believe its $75,000 price tag wasn’t justified.
Funco president Grant George has been building custom sand rails for 40 years. His Rialto-based company has produced similar dune buggy patrol cars for the federal Bureau of Land Management in several western states, including California. Oceano’s buggy was the first vehicle the company had ever built for California State Parks.
“If it’s used properly, it can cover the distance of a four-wheel-drive-type truck at quadruple the rate safely,” George said of the buggy. “From an EMS standpoint or a law enforcement standpoint, it’s superior in those areas.”
According to George, the company initially quoted the vehicle at $57,000 in 2001. The state’s Department of General Services rejected the purchase and sent Funco a list of specifications that significantly—and needlessly—bumped up the price, George said.
Among the requirements were a one-year bumper-to-bumper warranty and an extensive 60-hour training program, covering the vehicle’s operation and maintenance. George personally did the training session for the park rangers and service techs over a two-week period and included the cost in the purchase price.
He called the amount of training time “inordinate” and the department’s extra requirements, including their insistence on a brand new engine, “obscene.”
In other projects, he’d replaced engine parts in used low-mileage motors to keep costs down. For the buggy used in the Oceano SVRA, he was required to build the engine out of brand new parts, which lifted the engine’s price from $6,000 to far more than $15,000.
“It was just a waste of money, because it didn’t benefit anything,” George said. “Essentially, you end up with the same engine at triple the price.”
As to why the department made such demands, George can only speculate.
“DGS didn’t want the car in the fleet, that was my assumption,” he said. “Obviously someone at State Parks did want it, so somewhere in the political firestorm that ensued, they got it, with DGS’ stipulations.”
Repeated attempts to contact the Department of General Services for comment on the vehicle’s purchase were unsuccessful.
According to State Parks recreational division chief Phil Jenkins, the $18,000 jump in the purchase price was due entirely to changes DGS asked for after State Parks made a case for the vehicle. Department officials agreed to the purchase after seeing the Dunes in person, adding the warranties but declining a heavy-duty transmission.
The transmission decision has led to “a lot of problems.”
“It’s not a vehicle that anybody in state services had any experience with,” Jenkins said. “They were trying to make the best decision they could, based on the information they had. As it turns out, the other transmission would have been more sturdy.”
The vehicle has required repairs at a cost of several thousand dollars over the years. The trouble has centered on the transmission, combined with the specialized “paddle tires” necessary for gaining traction in sand, according to State Parks’ Zilke.
“We’ve had some mechanical problems, but I wouldn’t consider the cost of repairs to be exorbitant given the amount of time the vehicle’s been used,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of torque placed on the transmission. That has resulted in gear problems, so that’s what the primary issue has been.”
Despite being sidelined for a time, the buggy’s use has exceeded official expectations. Contrary to published media reports, State Parks has logged 4,000 hours—not miles—on the vehicle. Using the DGS’s own conversion figures, the number equates to 160,000 miles of operation in seven years, far beyond the department’s 8,000-miles-a-year estimate used to justify the purchase.
“We’re getting an adequate amount of use out of it,” Zilke said. “Certainly we’d like to use it more, but we’ll get the mechanical issues resolved and we’ll see the use increase and the cost go down.”
Despite the “mechanical issues,” State Parks’ Jenkins called the vehicle’s purchase a “good investment.”
“It’s provided us with a lot better response, and there’s a lot of people who have directly benefited from having this vehicle out on the dunes.
“We’re out there to provide the best public service we can and make sure that people are safe,” he added. “You need the tools to get you to the places they are.”
According to Jenkins, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2009 Executive Order to reduce state agencies’ vehicle fleets by 15 percent doesn’t affect the sand rail, because the order only applies to highway-licensed vehicles.
“We would have been turning in a vehicle that still had some useful life to it and not getting credit on that 15 percent vehicle reduction,” he said.
Oceano Dunes superintendent Zilke said the buggy is currently in operation, and the agency is looking to solve its transmission problem by converting from a stick shift to an automatic. According to the manufacturer, conversions to automatic transmissions can run anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, not including labor. The department hopes a nonprofit will fund the conversion.
As far as the money that’s already been spent, Zilke said, you can’t put a price on safety.
“Did it cost too much?” he asked. “I don’t look at it in those types of terms. I look at it in terms of value. If the vehicle is deployed and saves one life, is that worth the cost? I would say yes it is, just like any other piece of specialty equipment.”
Contact Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 18-25, 2010.