The Riverton City Council approved the purchase of two pickup trucks and a crack sealer during a regular meeting this week.
The two 2023 Chevrolet half-ton, four-wheel-drive work trucks cost about $39,000 each, for a total purchase price of $78,254, Riverton operations division manager Brian Eggleston said.
The bid came from Fremont Chevrolet Buick GMC in Riverton.
Fremont Motor Company also submitted a bid, for almost $47,000 per truck, or almost $94,000 total, Eggleston said.
The city had budgeted $72,000 for the purchase “based on early estimates, before dealer pricing was available to us,” Eggleston said, so “we are short $6,254” even for the lower bid.
“I would like to say we can probably absorb that in capital, (but) it’s too early to tell,” he said. “But even if we can’t, we probably would absorb that out of operations budgets.”
The bid for the crack sealer came in at about $85,500 – more than $10,000 under budget, Eggleston continued, prompting Mayor Richard Gard to comment, “It seems like you’ve already regained a position on the pickup trucks, and we appreciate that.”
Gard pointed out that the city saves money by maintaining its own crack sealer and “filling cracks and potholes on our own” instead of hiring private companies to do the work.
“We looked at a bid for crack sealing, and in that bid we could’ve bought this machine,” Gard said. “So I commend the city staff for seeing that and realizing that the crack sealing machine that we did have (was about) 11 years old.”
The new machine – a Cimline M1 Crack Sealer – comes from the Normont Equipment Company out of Great Falls, Montana.
The council approved all three purchases unanimously.
For more information call the City of Riverton at 856-2227.
Council meeting records are available on the city’s YouTube page.