11-06-2025
City signs 'Turf Tank' agreement to improve athletic field maintenance
PLATTSBURGH — The City of Plattsburgh's new autonomous 'Turf Tank' robot will make painting athletic field lines more cost effective and less time consuming going forward.
'What this does is this gives us the ability to take our man hours for painting fields and cut it down, probably, to about a third to a fourth,' DPW Assistant Superintendent Andrew Durrin told city councilors at their work session June 4.
'Basically, program it with all your field layouts, push a button and one person stays with it to paint all the fields.'
According to its website, the Turf Tank Two is a 'robotic field painter designed to mark all types of sports fields easier, faster, and more efficiently.'
Durrin clarified that the robot will allow DPW employees to focus and allocate their time elsewhere during the busy summer months.
For instance, Durrin said there is a lacrosse tournament Father's Day weekend and there are 12 fields that need to be painted by four to six workers over an entire week. He estimated it would normally take $21,000 worth of time and material to paint the fields themselves.
With the robot, they're already saving money and time, he said. It would likely take just a day and a half for one person to use the robot and finish the fields, he estimated.
'The rental for this Turf Tank is $16,000 a year,' he said, which doesn't include the first year start-up fee of $1,700.
'So already you'd save $4,000 just on the lacrosse tournament, not counting soccer fields that we paint, baseball fields, football fields.'
Councilors approved the rental contract for a Turf Tank at their meeting June 4.
The contract runs for three years and will cost the city $16,000 per year, plus an initial $1,700 set up fee for a total of $49,700. There is $3,000 worth of paint also included in the rental agreement.
Durrin said the city can opt out of the contract at any time, There's also a clause to extend the contract another three years at the same rate, he added.
'From what it was explained during the work session, this is going to save the city a considerable amount of money,' Ward 4 Councilor Jennifer Tallon said before voting to approve it.
'Yes, and if it doesn't, we can get out of it,' Mayor Wendell Hughes said.
'That's the important part. We do have an out.'
Among the benefits of the robot, the Turf Tank can also paint lines on pavement.
'If we repave a parking lot, we can actually put everything into the robot's data collector, and then paint all of the line strips and the parking lot,' Durrin said.
'Then we don't have to have another company come up and pay them to paint the lines.'
