Recently bid school bus contracts
As I previously mentioned, the BOE is looking for a waiver on the school bus contract. And when this first came up, it was explained that the recently bid CT school bus contract were starting around 10% for the first year. So a few days ago I asked Paul Calaluce for the details on those contracts. He and the Town Manager promptly got this information to the Council:
So that's some information. I also called the CT Conference of Municipalities for information on recently bid school bus contracts.
I'm curious if these were all bids for one year or multi-year contracts. Any bloggers care to do the legwork on that and call those school systems?
Tim White
4 comments:
For these few towns listed, do we know if the gasoline charges are included in the contract and were they included in their current contracts? As I understand it, Cheshire pays separately for gasoline for the buses so it's not included in our contract price. Couldn't this make a big difference when comparing contracts for different towns?
I have no additional information at this moment. But I agree that other significant factors are likely, such as labor (costs may jump in yr 1, but stabilize for following years) and total miles driven.
Cheshire has 194 (or so) miles of roads and around 5,000 students.
Towns, such as Derby and Canterbury, probably are not good comparisons.
Another dilemma faced by the TC, TM, and the voters. If the town goes out for bids rumor has it costs will go up even more then if the town doesn't go out for bids. According to the info provided Norwich is increasing by 13.9%.
The Day of New London recently reported that Norwich "...City Manager Alan Bergren is working on a city budget that calls for cuts of 4 to 8 percent from the current year's spending levels..." (9 Mar 09, "Proposed $69.1 Million School Budget To Face Public Questions Before Vote ")
Going out for bid as required by the rules the town operates under will of course require a bit of highly visible work on the part of town employees. Failure to re-bid the bus contract will only postpone the inevitable.
Looking at the numbers provided, I would have to assume that the contracts in the 10% increase range include the bus company buying the fuel themselves. If Cheshire is buying the fuel, we should see minimal increases. For ha-ha's, we should request bids for both the town buying fuel and the bus company buying fuel. The different companies may have fuel contracts that are cheeper than ours.
Post a Comment