Purchasing and maintaining fleet vehicles can be very expensive for cities, so Amarillo, Texas, chose another option — leasing fleet vehicles. When purchasing a fleet vehicle, there is the cost of purchasing the vehicle as well as maintenance and more frequent upkeep costs for it as the vehicle gets older. There is also the wait time between purchasing and receiving, as well as waiting for any repairs to be done. Leasing the vehicles has helped to fix many of those issues.
“We were trying to solve a very practical problem,” Donny Hooper, Amarillo, Texas, assistant city manager, stated. “An aging fleet with rising maintenance costs and a growing replacement backlog, while capital dollars were also being pulled in multiple directions, particularly toward heavy equipment needs. Leasing gave us a way to put more reliable vehicles back into service faster and smooth costs over time instead of waiting until we could cash-fund large replacement cycles.”
Before coming to this decision, the city went through many detailed meetings with departments. During these meetings, the city discussed vehicle types, job function, load capacity, passenger needs, annual mileage, operating environment and required upfits, such as light bars, lift gates or service bodies, to ensure that each department had the proper vehicles to match their workload…