NAUGATUCK — The school district’s business manager is hoping to translate savings on a copier contract into a lease on a new plow truck.
At its November meeting, the Board of Education approved a one-year extension on its three-year contract with Ricoh at a 15 percent discount. The contract expired last month. The Board of Mayor and Burgesses approved the same deal Tuesday.
The discount will save the district $7,000 this year and $13,500 next year on the $90,000-per-year contract, which includes 18 copiers as well as maintenance, according to Controller Robert Butler Jr., who is also the school business manager. The municipal government will save a few hundred dollars on two copiers, he said.
The savings would be enough to pay for the first year of a three-year lease on a Ford F250 truck with a plow to replace an old truck with 70,000 miles on it, Butler said.
The old truck would replace an interdistrict mail delivery car, a 1993 Dodge Shadow that recently failed, Butler said.
At the school board meeting, board member Glenn Connan asked whether the district could instead reimburse the mail driver for mileage on his or her personal car rather than buying a new car for the district. Board member James Scully suggested the town buy a new truck and give its old truck to the district. Butler promised to explore those options.
Butler said he was reluctant to start a new copier lease now because changes in technology in the next few years could dramatically impact the district’s need for copies. If the district moves to a cloud-based system through Google, there will probably be less demand for paper, but if the district purchases laptops instead, they could use more paper, Butler said.
For the next contract, Butler said he wanted to include the municipal copiers to increase the borough’s purchasing power for a better deal.
Butler said some of the copiers run off 1 million copies over their three-year life.
“These are industrial grade. They’re heavy duty,” Butler said.
Butler said copiers still cost a lot less than a high-volume printer on a per-page basis, at 1.5 cents per page versus 3.5 to 4 cents with a printer.
