MPD will purchase 2024 vehicles that are in stock rather than wait for 2025 vehicles for a savings of $60,000
At a recent meeting, Milford Chief of Police, Cecelia Ashe, requested $227,231 to purchase four new police vehicles from Hertrich. The purchase of the vehicles were approved in the FY25 budget.
“So during the budget hearings, I presented a request for $295,000 to replace these vehicles. We currently have an opportunity to purchase 2024 Durangos and one Chevy Tahoe,” Chief Ashe said. “The reason why I’m coming before council now is because, probably next month, September or October, you’re going to see a drastic increase in cost of vehicles. So, I want to try to get my hands on these 2024 before they start coming out with the 2025s.”
Chief Ashe continued that the vehicles were currently on Hertrich’s lot.
“So, the turnaround times will be probably several weeks versus months. If we were to purchase a 2025, we would actually have to wait for them to be made,” Chief Ashe said. “Most of the time, if you have to wait for them to be made there is probably, from talking with the dealerships, also going to be about a $10,000 additional cost if we were to purchase 2025 vehicles.”
By purchasing the vehicles now, Chief Ashe stated that it would be around a $60,000 cost savings.
“You’ll see we gave the breakdown of not only the year of the vehicle, the cost of the vehicle, the equipment is what we put inside the cars. That’s for the computers, the lights, the sirens, all of that. And that’s broken down for each so the request for the purchase of these replacement vehicles is $227,231 which we’re trying right now to create a cost savings of approximately $60,000 if we’re able to make this purchase now, compared to the original request of $295,000,” Chief Ashe said. “The vehicles that we would be replacing are 2010s and 2015s. Some of them are really up there and are well over 100,000 miles on each of those vehicles.”
Councilman James confirmed that approving this would save the city $60,000.
“Yes, because we budgeted based off of the anticipated costs of the 2025 what we were projecting would be the 2025 but as always, we try to be as fiscally responsible as possible. And so there may be, if you look at the numbers of the $295,000 compared to the $227,000 that’s about a $68,000 cost savings,” Chief Ashe said. “I would like to leave at least an $8,000 to $10,000 buffer in that savings, in case there was some type of equipment delay or shipping issues or something that the upfitter didn’t think of that needed to be in the car, but yes, I’m anticipating approximately a $60,000 cost savings. This is all already in our budget.”
Council approved the purchase unanimously.
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