Every unit serviced. Every unit written down.
Patrol cars, parks trucks, public works rigs, refuse units and utility vehicles all draw from one budget and all answer to the same council. Freeman Roadside Repair services them at the corp yard and hands back a document per vehicle that survives an audit.
- Open 24 hours, seven days
- No hourly minimum
- Licensed and insured
- Per-unit written records
A public fleet spends somebody else’s money
That single fact shapes everything about how a city, a district or a county department buys vehicle service. A private contractor with six vans can decide on a Tuesday to change vendors and nobody asks him to justify it. A fleet supervisor for a municipality cannot. He has a purchasing policy above him, a finance department beside him, and a council meeting somewhere in the calendar where a line item may get read out loud.
So the work has to be right and the paperwork has to be right, and the second one is where most vendors fall down. Plenty of mechanics can change oil in a parks truck. Fewer can hand over an invoice that lists the unit number the city uses, the odometer at service, what was performed, what was measured and left alone, and what the part was. That document is what turns a repair into a defensible expenditure.
We work the way a public agency needs a vendor to work. Quoted before authorized, performed at the corp yard, documented per unit, invoiced against whatever reference number your purchasing system issues. If the process requires a purchase order before a wrench turns, we wait for the purchase order. That is not a burden. It is how the money is supposed to move.
Who callsCity corp yards, special districts, water and sanitation departments, school transportation shops, parks and recreation divisions, and county facilities crews across Napa and Solano.
The figureA number goes on paper before anybody authorizes anything, which happens to be the exact sequence a purchase order already demands.
Working around policyBid thresholds, blanket purchase orders, insurance certificates on file. Send us your vendor requirements and we will meet them before the first visit.
One yard, six departments, six different vehicles
A mid-sized city corp yard is the most mixed fleet we see anywhere. In one row there will be a patrol sedan that idles more hours than it drives, a dump truck that runs a plow attachment two weeks a year and sits the rest, a refuse packer with a hydraulic body on a chassis, a parks crew pickup pulling a mower trailer, a water department service truck full of fittings, and a couple of compact units somebody bought on a grant.
Those vehicles share nothing except the budget. The sedan wants short-interval oil service because idle hours punish it in a way the odometer never shows. The packer wants its hydraulics looked at before its engine. The plow truck spends most of the year as a heavy pickup and then becomes something else entirely for a fortnight. A vendor who treats all six as the same vehicle on a mileage schedule is going to be wrong about most of them.
We set intervals per unit class rather than per fleet, and we say plainly which ones we are basing on hours instead of miles. On the equipment side, hydraulic bodies and lifting gear are their own conversation and live under industrial hydraulic repair and hydraulic hose replacement. Anything with air brakes is covered by air brake repair.
What a service record has to survive
Nobody reads a maintenance file until there is a reason to, and the reasons are rarely happy ones. Here is what ours is built to withstand.
- A budget hearingSomeone asks why the vehicle replacement line went up. A per-unit history showing what was done and when answers that in a page instead of an argument.
- A surplus or replacement decisionDeciding whether to keep a unit another two years needs its actual condition, not a guess. Measured pad thickness and tread depth from three visits back is a real input.
- A claim or an incidentIf a city vehicle is involved in something, the first question is whether it was maintained. A dated record with an odometer reading on it ends that line of questioning fast.
- An auditor’s sampleThey pull a handful of invoices and trace each one back to an authorization and a vehicle. Unit numbers, reference numbers and dates need to line up on their own.
- A staff turnoverThe supervisor who knew every unit by sound retires. What is left is the file, and the file has to be good enough to stand in for him.
The pieces a municipal account usually pulls on
Each of these has its own page because agencies buy them separately, sometimes on separate purchase orders. On a corp yard visit they get bundled into one stop.
Fleet maintenance reporting
The documentation side in detail: what the record contains per unit and how it gets back to your office.
BIT and FMCSA inspections
Public agencies run regulated vehicles too. The statutory inspection side sits on its own page.
Fleet uptime management
Spare capacity, interval planning and the arithmetic of how many units you can have down at once.
Fleet repair
When a unit is already down rather than due. Response to the yard or wherever it stopped.
Mobile fleet maintenance
The general case for any fleet serviced on site, and the place to start if you are new to the idea.
Fleet inspections
A written condition report per unit, which is often what a replacement schedule actually needs.
If a city cannot show what it did to a truck, then for every purpose that matters, it did nothing to that truck.
Patrick Freeman, owner
What fleet supervisors ask before they can proceed
Most of these are procurement questions rather than mechanical ones. A call sorts them quicker than an email chain.
Can you work under a purchase order rather than billing on the spot?
Yes, and that is how most of our public work runs. We give you the figure, you put it through whatever your policy requires, and nothing is performed until the authorization comes back. If your agency uses a blanket purchase order with a not-to-exceed amount for routine service, that works too. Tell us the reference number you need on the invoice and it goes on the invoice.
Our purchasing policy requires quotes above a threshold. Does that complicate things?
No. Routine per-unit service usually lands under the informal threshold, which is why many agencies handle it as a small purchase. When a repair is large enough to need formal quotes, we give you a written figure early enough to run the process, and we will say so rather than let you find out at the threshold. Knowing which side of the line a job falls on is part of what you are paying a vendor to know.
What happens when a storm or an emergency takes priority over the service schedule?
The schedule loses. If public works needs every truck available because water is coming over a road, a maintenance visit is the wrong thing to be doing to one of them. We reschedule and come back when the units are free, including nights and weekends. We are open around the clock partly so that catching up does not have to wait for a Monday.
Do you carry the insurance our risk office requires?
We are licensed and insured, and we supply certificates to your risk management office before the first visit rather than after somebody notices. If your agency requires specific limits or wants to be named as additional insured, send us the requirement with your vendor paperwork and we will confirm what we can meet before you commit to anything.
How detailed is the record we get for each vehicle?
Unit number as your fleet system calls it, date, odometer or hour meter, what was performed, what parts went in, and the measurements taken on anything checked but not replaced. Pad thickness and tread depth get a number rather than a word, because a number from six months ago is useful and the word good is not. The full picture of what a record contains is on the fleet maintenance reporting page.
Can you handle both the patrol sedans and the heavy units?
Yes, and mixed is normal at a corp yard. Light vehicles, medium duty trucks and diesel equipment are all in scope, and our diagnostic gear reads across them. Where a unit needs something specialized, we say so rather than improvise. Idle-heavy vehicles like patrol cars get intervals set on running hours rather than odometer miles, because that is what is actually wearing them out.
Send the unit list and the paperwork.
Give us the fleet inventory and whatever your purchasing department needs from a vendor. You get the scope and the figure on paper, in a form your finance office can process, long before anybody signs anything. The phone reaches the mechanic directly.
HoursMonday to Sunday, 24 hours
Based inAmerican Canyon, CA
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