The city’s financial services department has authorization to obtain a tender of bulk fuel purchase from the provincial government.
During Monday’s regular city council meeting, Coun. Don Mitchell brought forward the motion to authorize the financial services department to obtain authorization for the Saskatchewan Ministry of Central Services to tender and award the gas and diesel requirements for the city for a four-year term as recommended by financial services.
“The benefit of it is that it’s a bulk fuel purchase,” said Brian Acker, the director of financial services for the city. “We, through this process — combined with other agencies like SIAST, Sask. Environment, Sask. Corrections just to name a few — are able to go out and in effect tender for nine million litres of fuel versus the city’s requirements which are about 769,000. So it’s more than 10-fold.”
He said participating in the volume purchase of petroleum products allows the city to take advantage of the corresponding economies of scale resulting in “significantly lower prices.”
“Over the last year, we’ve done some comparisons in terms of basically what the pump price is to the price that we’re paying and it’s a significant discount that we receive by participating in this type of a tendering process,” said Acker. “The cost to the city from the Saskatchewan government is nil. They do not charge us anything for participating in this.”
For more information, see an upcoming edition of the Times-Herald.
