Smithtown looks for savings in town vehicle fleet, including fewer take-home cars

Smithtown officials are considering ways to cut the cost of its vehicle fleet, including a re-evaluation of its leasing agreement and having fewer employees take home their vehicles.

Smithtown Supervisor Ed Wehrheim said he has asked department heads to devise ways to save money, months after approving a budget over the state's tax cap. Wehrheim said town officials agreed to start the year by doing “everything we possibly could to establish more efficiencies."

The 2026 budget raised the tax levy by 10.7%, which for the average Smithtown homeowner means they will see a tax bill increase of roughly $160 annually, or 9%.

“The last thing this board wanted to do was to pierce the cap and raise taxes,” Wehrheim said in an interview. “I spent the better part of two months with the comptroller … trying to figure out a different way out. But it was impossible without the severe cuts of personnel and layoffs."

The town board and other agency directors met on Dec. 23 for a work session to discuss several ways to cut the cost of the vehicle fleet.

The town is reevaluating its agreement to lease vehicles with Enterprise, which took effect in 2015, said Paul Rubano, the town comptroller, during that meeting. The agreement allows the town to lease vehicles, which includes maintenance trucks as well as cars used by the parks and traffic safety departments.

Before that agreement, the town maintained a fleet of about 192 vehicles, some of which were as much as 11 years old and had an average of 67,000 miles on them. Maintaining them was expensive, triggering the switch, officials have said. The town, under the agreement, has “gotten to a better position than before” with 154 leased vehicles, most of which are no more than 4 years old.

Since 2016, average vehicle prices have risen along with interest rates, Rubano said. As a result, the town late last year paused its lease program to reevaluate it.

Rubano said in an email the town will switch the financing method on selected fleet vehicles from leasing to purchasing. This way, the town could potentially save up to $7,400 on new newly-acquired vehicles. Certain high-use vehicles would continue to be leased, Rubano said.

Wehrheim said the town should expect to save money if the leasing system is reworked. The town can keep lower-mileage vehicles while returning higher-mileage ones. 

Nicole Gargiulo, a town spokeswoman, said in an email: "The Town has temporarily paused the leasing program in order to evaluate the most fiscally responsible way to finance future vehicle acquisitions."

While the review is underway, she said, Smithtown will still "fully maintain and operate all existing vehicles and will continue to acquire or retire vehicles as needed to support daily operations. The evaluation strictly concerns the financing method — lease versus purchase — not the functionality or upkeep of the fleet."

Another option under review limiting the number of vehicles that town employees are allowed to take to and from their homes. There are about 52 take-home vehicles in use, according to a recent survey conducted by the town. Town officials are proposing to lower that number to 12, which Wehrheim said would save the town “a huge amount of money” on repair costs.