LAURIE WEIR

Smiths Falls is moving quickly to replace municipal equipment destroyed in a February garage fire, after council approved an urgent out-of-budget request this week.

At the May 26 committee of the whole meeting, public works director Paul McMunn presented a report outlining the need to replace a street sweeper and two fully outfitted plow trucks. He recommended bypassing the town’s procurement bylaw to sole-source the purchases due to time constraints and fleet compatibility.

The fire damaged several vehicles, and McMunn said continuing to work with Aebi Schmidt — the supplier of the town’s most recent equipment — made sense both financially and logistically.

“Aebi Schmidt has a good product,” McMunn said. “Staff are comfortable with the Freightliner chassis, and they’ve locked in pricing until June. After that, it goes up.”

Council approved the purchase, with the $329,716.14 cost to be covered by insurance payouts and reserve funds.

A new street sweeper will be purchased from Cubex Limited for $429,936, while the two plow trucks will come from Aebi Schmidt at $384,114 each. Delivery is expected by December 2025.

Some of the damaged equipment, including a 2005 Volvo grader and a 2012 International dump truck, will not be replaced.

Mayor Shawn Pankow asked why the grader wasn’t being replaced.

McMunn said the equipment is rarely used and contracting out the work would be more cost-effective.

“Taking into consideration that Director Stephanie Clark has a proposal to revamp Lower Reach Park with an asphalt parking lot, presumably in the near future it won’t be a gravel parking lot anymore,” he said.

There are gravel areas such as the road by the dog park and “odds and sods around town,” McMunn added. “But I don’t think it would make a whole lot of sense to have a grader in the fleet when we could be contracting services for the couple times we’d need it.”

The mayor agreed: “Half a million dollars for a grader we’d use a handful of times doesn’t make sense.”

Coun. Peter McKenna asked about the long-term plan for the garage. McMunn said the municipality is still working with its insurance provider and expects more clarity in the coming weeks.

“It’s been a very difficult file to work through because of the implications of the auto and property policies as they interweave,” he said. “It’s been challenging, but we’re working through it. More to come.”

The new equipment is expected to improve reliability across the fleet and ensure continuity in both winter and summer operations.