Alamance County’s manager has given a bit of a tune-up to a vehicle procurement policy that had become largely irrelevant due to the county’s increasingly tight budget.
County manager Heidi York insisted that the previous policy, which she instituted in 2023, had once been a valuable administrative tool when she presented a new version of these guidelines to the county’s board of commissioners on Tuesday.
York recalled that her original protocols had, for the first time, given her and her colleagues a systematic way to determine when an old vehicle should be retired from service.
“Over the past few years,” she went on to inform the county’s governing board, “we have not been following the policy because the funds have not been available to replace vehicles on a systematic basis based on the criteria that we have laid out.”
York said that, in order to bring these directives in line with the county’s financial realities, she and her colleagues have raised the mileages that the original policy had offered as one of the factors in a vehicle’s replacement.
The county manager added that some of biggest adjustments have been made to the odometer readings of the sheriff’s patrol cruisers, whose previous figures had been a point of discussion for the commissioners as they haggled over the county’s latest annual budget. The new protocols have raised the suggested replacement mileage for these vehicles from 125,000 to 135,000.
York said that she has also made tweaks to the figures for many non-emergency vehicles. In the case of county-owned trucks, vans, and utility vehicles, she adjusted them upward from 125,000 to 135,000 miles. In the meantime, she raised the threshold for cars from 150,000 to 160,000 miles. The county manager stayed her hand, however, when it came to the county’s ambulances, whose optimum replacement values remain at 250,000 miles.
In any case, the county manager stressed that these mileage counts will continue to be one of several criteria that the county’s administrators will consider when slating a vehicle for replacement.
“It’s not purely mileage drive,” she went on to explain. “We’re evaluating our vehicle needs on an annual basis, and we were trying to figure out, based on our financial availability, which of our vehicles are prioritized for replacement.”
York said that, as a purely internal policy, these vehicle replacement guidelines don’t necessarily need the approval of the county’s governing board. Even so, the commissioners chose to affirm the changes she shared in a 5-to-0 decision.
