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When the mayor of Fort Wayne, IN, ordered all his city department heads to “Go Green” in 2007, fleet manager Larry Campbell knew just what to do: Go into stealth mode.

Like hundreds of other government and utility fleet managers around the country have been in recent years, Campbell was suddenly faced with a mandate to clean up his vehicles without being told exactly how to do that. But Campbell had already given it a lot of thought, and he quickly responded by starting to use B20 biodiesel use in the city’s heavy trucks, taking delivery of two hybrid vehicles and working with the city’s fuel vendor to put in an E85 ethanol pump for his 57 flex-fuel vehicles (FFVs), all without telling the mayor.

No Problems

“I didn’t tell him I did that, because if it failed and we had problems, I didn’t want his name out there,” Campbell explains. “And then we had an ozone day, and then I let him know that we’d been doing it for a month and a half and didn’t have any problems, and he threw his speech away and took my notes and said, ‘You’re standing here, because if there are questions, you’re answering them!’”

Fortunately for Campbell and for the city, there have been no problems, and as for the mayor, “He has realized how much the city fleet could do to help with the green initiative,” Campbell says wryly.

Of course, this approach won’t work for everyone, but it does serve to illustrate the fact that fleet managers who are under orders from their mayors, their city councils, their governors, their CEOs or Boards of Directors, are now finding they have new options at their fingertips.