How a Small NJ City Brought Fleet Vehicle Maintenance Under Control with Issuetrak

In this article: The City of Bordentown, a historic one-square-mile municipality on the Delaware River in New Jersey, had no formal system for tracking fleet vehicle maintenance. With Issuetrak, the city stood up a single platform to log and prioritize maintenance requests, keep a full service history for each vehicle, and track labor and parts costs—turning a process that ran on memory and paper into one that runs on data.

Who Is the City of Bordentown?

Founded in 1682, Historic Bordentown City is a one-square-mile town along the Delaware River in Burlington County, New Jersey, home to just under 4,000 residents. Like many small municipalities, it runs lean: a compact staff is responsible for keeping public services—and the vehicles that deliver them—running every day.

Behind those services isa fleet of municipal vehicles and equipment that has to stay road-ready. When a plow, a public works truck, or a municipal vehicle goes down, the disruption is immediate and public.

The Challenge: No System Where a System Was Needed

Before Issuetrak, Bordentown had no dedicated issue-tracking or work-order system for fleet maintenance at all. Requests were handled informally, which made it hard to prioritize work, easy to lose track of what was outstanding, and nearly impossible to see the true cost of keeping each vehicle on the road.

For a small team, that “system of memory” approach carries real risk:

• Oversights happen. Without a tracked request, a maintenance need can quietly slip through the cracks until it becomes a breakdown.
• Prioritization is guesswork. With everything living in heads, inboxes, and notepads, it’s hard to know what’s urgent versus what can wait.
• Costs are invisible. When labor hours and parts aren’t recorded against a vehicle, there’s no reliable picture of what the fleet actually costs to maintain.

Why This Matters for Small Municipal Fleets

Bordentown’s situation is common across local government. Industry research finds that more than 60% of local government fleet managers rely on three or more disconnected systems to manage their fleets, creating data silos and inefficiency (AUTOsist). And without accurate tracking, fleet managers routinely underestimate true per-vehicle costs by 20 to 30% (MapTrack).

The bigger risk is what happens when tracking is absent altogether. Deferred or missed maintenance is expensive: emergency repairs can cost three to nine times more than the same work done as scheduled preventive maintenance (eWorkOrders), and fleets that operate reactively experience three to five times more unplanned downtime than those running structured maintenance programs. For a town where a single down vehicle can stall a public service, prevention isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a budget and service-delivery issue.

The Solution: One Platform for Requests, Assets, and Costs

Implementing Issuetrak established a fleet maintenance tracking system where none existed before—giving Bordentown a single place to capture, prioritize, and resolve requests while preventing the oversights that come with informal processes.

Two capabilities anchor the setup:

Together, these turn every maintenance request into a tracked, prioritized issue tied to a specific vehicle—and every vehicle into a running record of work done and money spent.

The Outcomes: Visibility, Prioritization, and Cost Control

With Issuetrak in place, the City of Bordentown can now:

• Monitor requests effortlessly in one unified platform, so nothing gets lost and the most urgent work rises to the top.
• Manage assets with full history, keeping detailed maintenance records for every vehicle in the fleet.
• Track billing and labor hours, building a clear, data-backed picture of fleet maintenance costs.
• Prevent oversights, replacing an informal process with a system that ensures requests are handled and prioritized.

From Reactive to Planned

The strategic payoff is bigger than tidier records. Issuetrak’s reporting capabilities let Bordentown track maintenance costs and labor hours over time—exactly the data a small team needs to allocate budgets effectively and predict future expenses. That’s the foundation for shifting from reactive, fix-it-when-it-breaks maintenance toward planned, preventive upkeep, where the cost savings and reliability gains live.

Is Issuetrak a Fit for Your Public Works or Fleet Team?

If your municipality is tracking vehicle maintenance the way Bordentown used to—on memory, paper, or scattered tools—the warning signs are familiar:

• You can’t quickly answer what maintenance is open, overdue, or coming up.
• A request can go missing until it becomes a breakdown.
• You don’t have a reliable, per-vehicle picture of maintenance costs and labor.
• Budgeting for the fleet is a guess, not a forecast.

Issuetrak gives small public works and fleet teams one platform to track requests, manage asset histories, and capture costs—so you can prioritize the right work and plan for what’s next.

Ready to Bring Your Fleet Maintenance Under Control?

See how Issuetrak helps public works and municipal teams track maintenance, assets, and costs in one place. Speak with a product expert →

Not ready to talk yet? Explore how local governments use Issuetrak to centralize requests and manage assets. Read more customer stories →

Sources: AUTOsist – Modern Fleet Management Software for Government Fleets; MapTrack – Equipment Downtime Cost Statistics; eWorkOrders – Reactive vs. Preventive Maintenance Cost Comparison. Customer details from internal Issuetrak engagement debrief (City of Bordentown, Fleet Vehicle Maintenance).