Askerlund's 220-person department uses a fleet of 25 utility vehicles — including electric golf carts and four electric utility vehicles — to perform their duties on the college's 13 campuses located in the Salt Lake Valley. The bulk of their use takes place on the three largest campuses, which have about 60 buildings.
"Primarily, (grounds workers) use them to haul small trailers carrying mowing and trimming equipment, as well as trailers for gathering debris, branches, leaves, clippings, things like that, to bring them back to our central green-waste disposal site," Askerlund says. "Most of the vehicles have a small dump bed in the back, so they use those to haul materials. In the winter, while we don't typically plow with them, we have small ice-melt spreaders mounted to several of them. So we disperse ice melt and salt with the vehicles, in some cases."
Department personnel also use the utility vehicles for mail and material distribution.
"For those tasks, we use a combination of a couple of vehicles," he says. "We use (electric) golf carts with an enclosed box on the back for distributing and picking up materials, and then dedicated electric vehicles, which are a little bit more road-worthy, although not licensed. We use those for longer-distance pickup and travel."
Many facilities use utility vehicles to move people from point to point on campuses, and Salt Lake Community College is no exception.
"We have a couple of vehicles that are dedicated for people, and they are golf-cart-type vehicles," Askerlund says. "Some of our support staff also use those, like project managers who are overseeing projects that are on one campus. They can take a golf-cart-type vehicle across campus."
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