City of Kilgore approves $260,000 truck order as part of cost-saving fleet plan

Kilgore News Herald
By Lucas Strough, lstrough@kilgorenewsherald.com
November 30, 2023

The Kilgore City Council approved the execution of a purchase order with Enterprise Fleet Management for six work trucks in an amount not to exceed $260,814.84.

The purchase was made as part of the city’s contract with Enterprise Fleet Management, which was formed last year in an effort to reduce the cost of finding and purchasing vehicles for the city’s non-emergency work fleet.

This latest purchase in the fleet management plan is for six 2024 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 work trucks with 4x2 double cabs.

Director of Public Works Clay Evers broke down the purchase order for council members.

“We are in a purchase model with Enterprise Fleet Management to manage the purchase of our Public Works and non-emergency vehicle fleets,” Evers said.

“We are rotating out our old vehicles and this is the next round of purchases for six vehicles. We are still negotiating for another vehicle for our Animal Control Dept. but these are six normal Public Works vehicles.”

The city was in talks with Enterprise Fleet Management for years before entering into a contract with them in 2022 and received the first delivery of six new work trucks earlier this year.

Because Enterprise owns and operates such a large fleet — approximately 1.9 million vehicles — they can take advantage of volume discounts from manufacturers and have a ready supply of new vehicles on hand at all times to continuously swap out aging vehicles from a city’s fleet.

Council members said last year the goal of the plan was to evaluate a new fleet management model which proposes to take advantage of purchasing discounts available to local governments and and resale power and network of a national company (Enterprise) to create a sustainable vehicle replacement model that will lower the capital cost of ownership for much of the light vehicle fleet. It is also anticipated to yield savings in maintenance and fuel costs.

The contract documents indicate the proposal from Enterprise calls for lowering the average city work vehicle lifecycle from 12 to 4 years. The plan calls for gradually phasing new vehicles into the fleet while phasing out older models over a period of years.

City Manager Josh Selleck said at the recent council meeting the plan had undergone some revisions but was still delivering as expected.

“We worked with Enterprise to reconstruct the model,” Selleck said.

“We’ve been on a 12-month turn as we initially proposed. The economy doesn’t allow for that anymore. Now, we’re on a 48-month turn. One of the biggest cost savings on this is the maintenance, which we’re not fully realizing yet because we haven’t yet replaced all of the old fleet. There is a definite benefit to it and we’ve also been able to eliminate one position from our fleet maintenance department. We’ve outsourced a lot of this fleet maintenance and we’re seeing much faster return-to-work times and to shrink some of our unused backup fleet.”

Evers agreed the most significant benefits of the fleet management model were yet to be realized, as the city will continue to make money from the sale of their old vehicles and as the city’s work fleet gradually transitions to entirely new or almost-new vehicles, which have better gas mileage and need less maintenance compared to vehicles which the city maintained for years and, in some cases, decades.

“Currently we’re still auctioning off our old vehicles that we did not purchase through the program so Enterprise can’t sell those vehicles for us,” Evers said.

“We have gotten amazing returns on those old vehicles but the true test is going to be when we sell the vehicles that we’ve leased through Enterprise. We need to let that go through one full round to evaluate it because (selling is) where the value truly lies. We’re getting closer to the next round and we’ll do eight more (purchases) next year.”

Council members approved the purchase order unanimously.