Passion and Precision: Colt Feinauer Named CCSD’s 2025 Mechanic of the Year
How many school buses does it take to help over 20,000 students get to school? About 150. Colt Feinauer, CCSD Mechanic of the Year, takes deep pride in maintaining those buses each day.
Feinauer is a veteran of the CCSD Transportation Department, a position he’s held for 11 years. His team values his hard work and easy laugh. “Colt has a great personality, and he’s appreciated by all he works with,” a coworker shared.
Transportation Director Wayne Reese smiled when asked about him. “Colt loves anything that goes fast and loud, he said. “It seems, the louder the vehicle is, the faster he thinks it must go!”
Juggling lots of moving pieces is all in a days work for Feinauer. In addition to his full-time job in the Transportation Department, he is also raising three children with his wife and managing a side hustle building aluminum “Combo Tanks” for racecars all over the world.
Working with cars is both nature and nurture for Colt. “Fixing cars is something that I have always done,” he said. “My dad’s a mechanic for Cache County, so I grew up doing that kind of work.” His homegrown passion grew both during high school, when he worked in a friend’s mechanic shop, and as he completed his certification at Wyoming Tech. Now, after 18 years in the field, he says he enjoys specializing in buses.
“Buses are completely different than other car work, and it’s rewarding,” he said. “There’s a certain consistency in them. But even though that’s comfortable, I love it when there’s a challenge. I love when there’s an tricky issue with a bus– something that really stumps me, and then working through it and figuring it out.”
Reese praised Feinauer’s passion as a gift. “Colt has an incredible mind,” he said. “He understands the mechanics and the electronics of modern school buses, and he is terrific at running diagnostics and finding solutions.”
For this Mechanic of the Year, the greatest satisfaction at the end of the day is helping kids get to school safely. “There’s (literally) a lot that rides on the buses running properly every day,” Feinauer said. “Our team works really hard to make sure that there are no problems,” he reflected. “If there are no problems– if no one else ever stops to think about the buses needing maintenance, that means we’ve done our job correctly.”
