West Cook News

Oak Park public works director Robert Sproule recently gave an update to the board about the village’s fleet.

During a Dec. 15 village board meeting, Sproule spoke to the board about updated vehicle purchase processes for the village fleet. Back on Oct. 10, the village board passed an ordinance that gave the village manager authority to negotiate and purchase vehicles for the village without prior board approval, and bring the purchases back to the board afterwards.

The reason the board passed that ordinance was because of the difficulty of many municipalities in the area, not just Oak Park, to receive any new vehicles in a tight automotive market. Since they passed that ordinance, two more of Oak Park’s vehicle orders were canceled; hybrid Ford escapes that were meant for the police department and engineering staff.

"The ability to procure vehicles is just as difficult, if not more so than it was a couple of months ago, as we are getting informed about possible procurement windows for manufacturers," Oak Park Public Works Director Robert Sproule said at the meeting. "Ford, for example, is already limiting the number of vehicles that can be purchased by individual organizations, and they're canceling orders already that are exceeding what they think that they can occupy next year. So we really are most likely going to be living within the retail market for 2023 on any vehicles that we can procure. So unless the board feels strongly otherwise, we would just propose to continue under that continued spending authority. We will bring items to the board afterwards, as we have been doing in terms of verifying that purchase and if opportunities do continue to present themselves, where we can use traditional procurement methods and bring items to the board prior to purchase, we will do that. But we just kind of wanted to get before the board at this time. We are in the midst of the need to either sign, order, acknowledgments or create purchase orders for possible future orders. So we wanted to at least keep up the board up to date on what's happening now."

Oak Park was able to gain three vehicles because of the ordinance: an all-electric vehicle for animal control, and a hybrid Ford maverick for the water pumping staff. The third vehicle is a Ford F250, which was originally planned for the 2023 budget, however, the village was offered a 2022 at an earlier date and lower cost, so they decided to accept it. The board agreed that the manager could continue with the purchasing authority until the market becomes less volatile.