The Bartholomew County Commissioners on Monday approved the purchase of new vehicles for the sheriff’s office, ending an odyssey where it had been difficult to obtain them.
The sheriff’s office received no new vehicles last year, a microcosm of a widespread issue being felt by law enforcement agencies across the country. After an order backlog, the office switched its vehicle order from Dodge Ram 1500 pickup trucks to Chevy Tahoes. The commissioners approved the purchase of five new Tahoes that will be added to the fleet at a cost of $253,500, all while pointing out how much the process has changed.
“How do we follow the time honored process of buying law enforcement vehicles through bid?” Commissioner Tony London asked. “I mean you can’t, it’s not going to work anymore.”
Companies used to build large amounts of police vehicles, the dealerships would receive them and they would in turn be bid on. Once COVID-19 came around, that began to change and now they are strictly build to order, Maj. Brandon Slate said.
“With the supply and demand issues that they’ve run into, they would rather spend their time building those vehicle for retail and not have a surplus of fleet vehicles.”
Had he not been able to secure an order of the vehicles during a 24 hour window that was opened by the manufacturer in the past couple of weeks, it might not have been until 2025 til new vehicles could be attained, Slate said.
“We thankfully had already had the meeting and opened the bids…and so we had a qualifying bid that we just needed to review specs on.”
Slate expects the vehicles to be delivered by July or August.
