Finance Committee - 11/20/2019 Page 9
Deputy Chief Testaverde
Thank you sir. These 3 unmarked vehicles — historically the Nashua Police Department has utilized Chevy
Impalas or Ford Taurus for our unmarked vehicles. I’m sure everyone is familiar seeing them around town.
Both Chevy and Ford have discontinued those models, forcing us to go with a new vehicle. We did a study
and it was determined that our best course of action is to have our unmarked vehicles mirror our marked
vehicle units. There are many benefits to that; | can walk you through this package. It is fairly self-explanatory,
but the biggest benefit | can tell you is that currently for our marked fleet we have the Ford Police Interceptor
Utility Vehicle. If a marked vehicle becomes inoperable due to an accident or other damage, we are able now
if we move forward with this plan to take an unmarked vehicle from say the Detective Bureau for instance and
after retrofitting it with the emergency lighting, light bars and audio equipment and have another vehicle in the
fleet; as opposed to the alternative would be it can take up to six months to get a new vehicle into the fleet.
Additionally all of our mechanics are very, very familiar with this vehicle. The alternative vehicle that we looked
at was the Dodge Charger, it is a vehicle you can see with other Police Departments including State Police. It
is a good car but it is not a great fit for us in this municipality. You'll see the gas mileage, while it is consistent
with the Ford it is not as good. Also one of the biggest we had was with the key. Currently if you would
indulge me for a moment. This key | hold in my hand operates every Ford in our entire fleet at the Police
Department and this key operates every Chevy. If we continue, if we switch our unmarked vehicles to the Ford
Interceptor as | am asking you to allow us to do today, we will be able to continue that model. If we have to
move to another vehicle, say the Dodge Charger, with that technology, each individual vehicle would have its
own key and to get a new key, which does happen when things get lost or you know outdated, would be a cost
of $196.20 per key which becomes a significant cost when you add it up.
At the end of the day, wear and tear and being able to have the interoperability between unmarked and marked
vehicles seemed like a no-brainer to us and you'd see the cost is still fairly consistent.
Alderman Klee
| just have one quick question. The nice thing about having an unmarked vehicle is that it is unmarked and no
one knows. | don’t know a lot about these vehicles, but are these a very common vehicle that we would see on
the street? | Know when everybody had the Taurus or everybody had that, people would say, “that’s an
unmarked vehicle” you know, you just knew. And if you bought one, people would say, “OH you got a Police
Vehicle”. Would that happen here or are these a very, very common vehicle that you would just see them on
the streets anyways.
Deputy Chief Testaverde
It’s a good question, my opinion on that is within a short period of time, the citizens of Nashua would be able to
identify these vehicles from about six blocks away just from seeing it. At first, they are not used to seeing it,
they can pick out our Detective Chevy Impalas fairly quickly but | think as times goes on it would become
commonplace.
Alderwoman Kelly
Forgive me, | am trying to pull up the contract. Are you going for the hybrid or the eco-boost?
Deputy Chief Testaverde
We are actually going for the third, if you go to the very last page, the all-wheel drive vehicle, just the utility.
That is currently what we have in our fleet. You'll see some benefits with some of the other vehicles, but at
the end of the day, in the third column, the 3.3 liter, all-wheel drive vehicle, it is the lower of all the prices. It is
the vehicle that we use with our marked units, the interoperability and interchangeability would be perfect.
