Equipment Issues

Few businesses are the lifetime owners of a vehicle. At some point a vehicle becomes unacceptable with regard to cost and reliability. The ideal time for disposal is just before regular problems start. Determining where this point is requires intense fleet management. The Fleet manager must understand the vehicle, the types of uses and conditions the vehicle faces, record the preventive maintenance, and regularly run analysis of the vehicle’s condition. Short of having a staff to run fleet maintenance, a manager must rely on the experience of others. Many small cities buy a vehicle for the entire lifecycle of the vehicle; a well-managed city will use the same criteria that businesses use and the experiences of other municipalities. City Council’s require the services costs to be as low as possible and the reliability as high as possible. Without investing significant dollars into fleet management because our fleet is not large enough to justify the expenses, but trying to capture cost saving and improve reliability means keeping the vehicles on a turnover schedule.
Studies and even common sense indicate that costs are influenced by age, miles, loads carried, terrain, weather, type of use, driving habits, maintenance policies and quality of maintenance performed. Each municipality can claim to have rather unique conditions for their vehicles and equipment, but the generalized experiences provide enough benefit to utilize the knowledge and resulting systems.
The City of Lake Mills currently only utilizes a mid-lifecycle disposal plan with Police squad cars. A car should have a normal lifecycle of less than ten years. Standard practice is to turnover the vehicles in three to five years based on cost, reliability and conditions. A squad car generally faces very harsh conditions for a vehicle and needs high reliability. The four-year turnover plan is the middle option based on good preventive maintenance practices without fleet records and conditions analysis. The practice is cost effective based on the size of our fleet and meets the needs defined for this department.
The City currently does not use this approach for all their vehicles and equipment. The request for such schedules is fiscally responsible and encourages better management practices.