ROCHELLE — Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Rochelle was often able to buy public works vehicles and receive them within 60 days. 

Now, lead times after ordering can take a year. 

A multitude of supply chain issues brought about by the pandemic have affected the way the city does business, City Manager Jeff Fiegenschuh said. Lead times for supplies are longer as well. Materials needed for projects are more expensive. 

“Before the pandemic and the shortage of products and equipment and things like that, it always seemed that bids would come in under the engineer's estimate,” Fiegenschuh said. “And now they're exceeding the engineer's estimate.”

About 3.5 years ago, the city council issued about $4.5 million in alternate revenue bonds to fund infrastructure projects. A lot of street and storm sewer work projects started before pandemic price increases started to be seen. The city manager said that was a stroke of luck for the city, but changes have negatively impacted it since. 

Fiegenschuh said notable impacts have been seen in the water, wastewater and electric departments. The biggest effect has been in lead times. Rochelle Municipal Utilities Superintendent of Electric Operations Blake Toliver told Fiegenschuh last week that new pad mount electrical transformers have lead times of over two years now.

“If you don't have an outage, it doesn't matter,” Fiegenschuh said. “But if a storm comes through and you have eight pad mount transformers and the storm takes out eight of them and you use all the ones in storage and have none left in inventory and it takes two years to get them, it can be extremely scary.”

Planning has become imperative in dealing with lead times and supply chain issues. Fiegenschuh said Toliver has ordered a few rebuilt transformers that have shorter lead times of less than a year. When he needed cable for an ongoing substation project, Toliver called around to other communities and bought extra cable from them when it couldn’t be ordered and received in time.

“You become inventive and try to find ways to get stuff done,” Fiegenschuh said. “We look for ways to either get rebuilt equipment or go to other communities that might have excess inventory and see if they'll sell some of it.”

In the water and wastewater departments, the city has seen prices and lead times increase on piping for water main installments. When it did a storm sewer inlet project in town, it saw price increases for storm sewer tiles and joints. 

The lead time on two dump trucks purchased by the city council at last week’s meeting is a year. The city utilizes a service for its smaller vehicle fleet where new vehicles are rotated in and replace outdated models it owns. That has made dealing with supply chain issues in that specific area easier over the past two years. 

Fiegenschuh said due to the current economic situation, time isn’t wasted in the process of bringing a purchase before the city council to be approved, especially with larger things like transformer purchases and anything related to infrastructure. 

“Now, it's just, 'OK, well we know something might be two years out and the project isn't slated for a year and a half, but maybe if we can get it, we should be looking at purchasing it now,'” Fiegenschuh said. “It's on a case-by-case basis, but we certainly keep our eyes open more often now for equipment and things like that that we might need for future projects because we don't know when it'll be available."

Any time the city does a capital project, its engineer or a contracted engineer puts a price estimate together. Higher costs due to the past two years have already been noticed. An example Fiegenschuh used was a street construction that used to cost $500,000 being in the ballpark of $750,000 now. 

There have always been inflationary increases each year on purchases for the city, but Fiegenschuh said those haven’t compared to the increases of the past two years. 

“It's more or less just preparing yourself and your elected officials for the fact that the costs have gone up,” Fiegenschuh said. “You have two options. You either pay the additional cost or you don't do the project. The mayor and council have been very studious with those tax dollars and did projects up front and got them done before the pandemic even happened. I can't even imagine what some of those street reconstruction projects would have cost if we were doing them now instead of doing them two years ago."

The city utilizes a 20-year capital improvement plan to organize projects and how it will pay for them. The city manager hopes as the pandemic starts to fade away, inflationary pressures will rescind, and supply chains will normalize.

“And what we'll do then is, we have to refigure and reprioritize what needs to be done first,” Fiegenschuh said. “Whatever that is, in any department. As a city, we only have so much money to work with and you just reprioritize and do what you can with funding.”