(Radio Iowa) – Administrators at the Iowa Department of Transportation says they are cutting the budget for the next fiscal year in part with savings in building construction and equipment. The D-O-T’s Melissa Gillette says the big construction project is a new maintenance garage in Alton in Sioux County. “The newest sections of the Alton garage were constructed in the 1970s, but the oldest were constructed in the 1940s. So of course, our equipment has changed,” she says. Gillette told the Transportation Commission the new garage will provide much more space.

“This will allow us to expand into 12 maintenance bays and two wash bays, appropriately sized, as you can see there, rebuilding on land that we already own, “Gillette says. “And simply we have outgrown what our older facilities were designed to accommodate. And so this is a 13 million dollar recommended budget for the replacement of the Alton garage.” She says the budget is four-point-nine million dollars less than the last new garage the D-O-T built. Gillette says they are making some changes that will allow the D-O-T to save million of dollars in the budget for the equipment that is maintained at the state garages. “That includes leasing tractors versus owning. So we’ve identified a significant savings and positive return on investment by making this choice. And so this is something that our teams have been working toward for some time,” she says.

Gillette says they started looking at their plow configurations after the pandemic and have dramatically reduced them to help save costs.  “We, of course, like everyone else, had supply chain issues and were struggling to receive our plow trucks on time. And so the team work together to identify an opportunity to streamline and standardize those configurations,” Gillette says. “We had 55 separate different configurations that we were sending out to outfitters, and we were able to reduce that and standardize that to five.” She says the has helped with the supply chain issues as they don’t need as many different types of truck setups. Gillette says they cut 33 light vehicles from their fleet and the total equipment savings will be 14-point-six million dollars.