Adam Prudhomme
Beaver Staff
There were no surprise major expenditures on the docket for Greater Napanee’s fleet rationalization plan, as presented to council during the second round of budget meetings on Thursday evening.
Town staff did a bit of juggling within the fleet to keep their ask within budget for this year.
“It’s pretty much business as usual,” said Greater Napanee chief administrative officer Ray Callery. “There’s not a lot of major changes. From a fleet perspective, to make sure we both meet our amount allotted in our reserves and also because of some equipment purchase timing, nothing’s been really moved ahead. We have a couple of vehicles that have been moved back slightly.”
If the town were to follow its usual formula for replacing vehicles, there would have been 11 vehicles that needed to be purchased in 2018. Instead they were able to repurpose some of the vehicles to other departments to whittle that number down to seven for this year.
“Based on cost and the replacement cycle, there wasn’t enough money in the reserve to fund the entire 11 vehicles,” explains GNES fire chief Rob Serson, who presented to council the proposed fleet replacement budget.
All told the seven requested vehicles, four pick-ups, one dump truck, a sedan and a passenger van, would cost $333,000.
Looking at the broader picture, Serson told council their vehicle replacement cycle projects for the town to need to replace 29 vehicles over the next five years at an estimated cost of $2.6 million.
Along with fleet rationalization, council was also presented with the first draft of the major expense review.
Representing about $5 million of the town’s total 2018 budget, council was told the vast majority of the cost came from service contracts, which were $794,475, accounting for 16 per cent of the $5 million. Contractors (14 per cent), sand, salt and gravel (12 per cent), insurance (10 per cent), engineers/consultants (eight per cent) and maintenance (nine per cent) were the other major contributors.
Council voted to receive the reports. The next budget meeting, the third in the four meeting process, is scheduled to take place March 8 with the final meeting on March 22.