Smithtown board gives green light to fleet upgrade
Town unanimously approves comptroller’s plan to breathe new life into aging vehicles through leasing
Smithtown is going ahead with plans to upgrade its vehicle fleet.
The Smithtown Town Board voted unanimously at its meeting last Thursday night, Jan. 21, to enter into an agreement with Enterprise Fleet Management and gradually upgrade its aging vehicle fleet. Over the next year, the town will begin phasing in 23 new high-mileage vehicles into its fleet with more to come, according to the agreement with Enterprise FM Trust.
The proposal came from town Comptroller Donald Musgnug, who brought Enterprise representatives to the board before a work session earlier this month calling on the town to upgrade its 192-vehicle fleet. Most of those vehicles, Musgnug said, were approaching two decades in age and six-digit mileage numbers.
“Clearly we have an aging fleet,” Musgnug said to the board at the work session. “Enterprise is one of the leaders in this industry. The proposal is on the table.”
Musgnug said Smithtown had about $986,000 set aside in its 2016 budget for the purchasing and maintenance of the town’s vehicle fleet used across various departments, and with Enterprise’s help, the town would be replacing about 173 of its vehicles over the next five years and save money while doing it.
According to the deal, Enterprise would purchase the vehicles directly from various manufacturers and use government incentives while leasing them out to the town for prices Smithtown would not be able to acquire on its own, the Enterprise leasing representatives said.
“We’ve been doing this with a lot of New York entities,” said Jacob Garth, government marketing manager at Enterprise at a work session earlier this month. “We do more than just managing and acquiring vehicles. When we look at the fleet, one of the key objectives we make is to lower the age of the fleet, and a significant portion of your fleet is more than 10 years old.”
Garth said that municipalities like Smithtown typically purchase their vehicles via state contractors, which often limit purchases to only one manufacturer. Enterprise, however, has more than 1.6 million vehicles in its fleet from a range of manufacturers, which Garth argued would give Smithtown more opportunity for savings through open-ended leases.
Fleet consultant Jay Greene of Enterprise also said his group has already signed onto similar agreements with Brookhaven and Huntington towns and started discussing plans with Smithtown back in September.
