Results.....
I forgot to post what happened on this..... thanks for the replies.
We put a new c in right away (I should have mentioned that). We replaced the damper thinking that was the cause after speaking w/ the techs at mutoh and that didn't work. So we went on to the Maint. Station and they said we needed to replace that....so we were ordering the part when we decided to pour a good amount of the cleaning cartridge onto the maint. station pad. Walaa it worked! The suction was clogged up somehow with old ink but has been perfect ever since.