Politics & Government

Dearborn DPW Street Sweepers Will Save City Money

The city council approved renting two sweepers from Bell Equipment to complete work on streets this year.

Street sweeping in Dearborn will return to an in-house service overseen by the Department of Public Works following a decision by the city council.

The council voted 6-0 at its July 23 meeting to approve a contract for the rental of truck-mounted mechanical street sweepers from Bell Equipment for $133,000 to clean major roadways and residential streets for the 2013 fiscal year.

The contract will allow the city to rent two sweepers for the months of August, September, April through June, and four sweepers for December at $9,500 per month per sweeper.

In the past, the service was contracted out, most recently to Brock Sweeping in Wyandotte. When bids were solicited for the service year, however, the prices were twice the amount the city paid in 2012.

According to DPW Director Jim Murray, last year the city paid Brock $270,000 for 10 sweeps in a season. The company did not request to renew its contract, and Murray said the lowest bid this year was roughly $520,000.

"Street sweeping is an issue that is near and dear to all of our hearts," Murray said during a briefing session with Mayor John B. O'Reilly.

Murray said that, should the city decide to eventually purchase the sweepers, Bell Equipment would credit the city with 90 percent of the rental payments toward the purchase price.

In order to adequately cover the city's 274 miles of streets, the DPW would need to purchase four machines at a cost of $250,000 each, in addition to the two trucks it already owns.

As part of a long-term plan, the DPW has approached the cities of Taylor, Dearborn Heights, Westland, Livonia and Inkster to develop a consortium and share sweepers in order to offset some of the annual maintenance and repair cost of the machines.

"We use the machines during 50 percent of the sweeping season. If we can find other partners that could use them the other 50 percent of the time, that might cut our machine cost in half," Murray said.

Councilman David Bazzy said he's hesitant to approve a plan to purchase machines without careful consideration of a cost-benefit analysis.

"There's four things that are really critical in making a decision like this: What's the cost of buying new equipment? What's the life expectancy of each piece of equipment? What's the cost of manpower? How many sweeps across the city are we capable of doing with our employees?"

Murray said each machine has a life expectancy of eight to 10 years, and the cost of manpower is roughly $100,000.

A recommendation is expected to go before the council for consideration in February 2014, he said.


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