Yeah, cities that get them have no clue about the long term costs. A lot of those ‘free’ units are now just sitting in a fenced parking lot and are unusable.
When I was younger and a volunteer firefighter in a small rural town, we needed to replace one of our ‘grass rigs’ for fighting wildland fires. We had used it for over 35 years - and we got it second hand from our state DNR for free. We thought a Humvee truck style bed would make a fantastic grass rig. We checked in on it and the DOD straight up told us nope, you can’t have a used one - no one can get one. We use them for target practice. Perhaps they saved us from a money pit. We ended up with another used pickup from the DNR return pool.