Tipperary council could face €250,000 fuel bill surge as diesel nears €2 per litre
With diesel prices across Tipperary hovering around €2 per litre, the county council could face an additional €250,000 in fuel costs over the next year.
Speaking to the Irish Independent, James Murray, senior engineer with the council said that if fuel costs remain around €2 per litre due to instability in the Middle East, services could potentially be cut, but stressed that this was not yet the case.
"It’s very difficult for us to turn around as a local authority and say we’re cutting services, that is the end of the world for us. We’re a public service, we want to provide these services,” Mr Murray said.
“The cost of fuel goes to the five districts in Tipperary, so the cost of it is spread around the organisation, whoever is hiring the vehicle, because the fleet services act almost as an internal business, and that’s the way services run, so it spreads out everywhere.
“Every service is affected,” he said, including environmental work, road maintenance and surface dressing programmes. “Fleet, in many ways, touches everything, and that’s the challenge around it,” Mr Murray added.
Tipperary County Council currently has two plant yards – one in Nenagh and one in Clonmel – with a fleet of more than 250 vehicles, ranging from vans, to 16 tonne trucks, excavators, forklifts, and road patching units.
The local authority has a demand of over 800,000 litres of fuel a year, Mr Murray said, with current figures leading to a €250,000 increase in fuel costs if the war in the Middle East lasts for 12 months.
"It’s a very significant additional operational cost. Some of our fleet only work between 8am and 6pm, so we don’t have stuff on the road all day long, but if you had a haulage business and you had vehicles on the road for 20 hours a day, that cost would very easily be €1million.
"It’s so volatile now, literally every day we’re looking at what the impact is,” he said.
If costs continue to rise, the council may have to seek additional funding from central Government.
"At the moment it’s very much a wait and see approach, for fleet services in particular, because it’s so volatile and depending on what happens in the Middle East, and whether it escalates or de-escalates, the prices could come down again quite quickly,” Mr Murray said.
"There is always a day of reckoning at the end of the year when you reconcile your accounts, and we’re funded hugely through the different Department of Transport grants for our roadworks programme, for our surface dressing programme, and through our own funds within the local authority.
"If this is to endure for six to eight weeks or even into three months into the second half of the year, we certainly would be looking towards central Government to see is there additional funding available to try and cover these costs, or is there roadworks projects that have to be truncated.
"We certainly don’t want to do that, and that is not on the cards at the moment, but you have to have money to operate,” he added.