BARRHEAD - Woodlands County will be delaying the purchase of five new pick-up trucks until next year as all of the quotes the municipality received were significantly over budget.
County councillors passed a motion at their Feb. 2 meeting to reject all bids received for the 2022 pick-up replacement tender.
Director of infrastructure Andre Bachand said they had advertised locally and online for a dealer to provide the municipality with five quarter-ton pick-up trucks.
They received three bids, with the lowest bid coming in at $68,213 per truck for a total of $341,067.
Bachand noted that when the county had purchased its last trucks, they had only cost $38,000 each, noting that they were “pretty much” the same configuration as the trucks they were seeking this year.
Administration did some further research and determined that government discounts are not available right now for the purchase of vehicles, Bachand said.
They also investigated leasing the vehicles for a year and determined it would cost $34,196 per truck.
Given all these factors and some early indications that the price of trucks may be more favourable in 2023, Bachand recommended rejecting all of the bids.
“We will get through the next year with our current fleet. It will be a bit difficult at times,” he said, noting he had been speaking with chief administrative officer Gordon Frank about bringing his own county vehicle back into the operations fleet.
Coun. Peter Kuelken asked administration why the county was in this position, noting that the difference between the estimated price of these trucks and their actual cost is quite high.
“I would have suggested that there should have been a quote prior to budget time, so we understood this better,” he said.
“The question I would ask of you is why did it get to this point, because we were basically making a budget decision based on trucks that were bought a few years ago.”
Frank said administration can only predict the future to a certain degree, adding that no one could have foreseen the supply chain issues that are driving up truck prices or that government discounts would no longer be available.
Mayor John Burrows said this is why he had put forward a motion for administration to review the capital budget during the earlier discussion around the aggregate crushing tender.
“These are pretty unprecedented times on the economic side. And this is one of the things I really worried about going into this particular year,” he said.
