A tale of two trucks and $90,000
Jasper Street Department Commissioner Raymie Eckerle was proud as punch to inform the Jasper Board of Public Works about saving the department and city about $90,000 on a new dump truck.
The Street Department has used two military surplus dump trucks to carry tearout materials from street repairs for disposal for many years. According to Eckerle it was time to retire the ’68 and ’67 model year trucks and, after receiving permission from the board of public works, he placed requests with several local commercial truck dealers for two used commercial truck chassis.
Commercial Truck Sales, Inc., in Bretzville, located two 2005 Freightliner chassis; one with about 440,000 miles on it and another with 330,000 miles, and the street department purchased them for about $29,000 apiece.
Department employees then took about two weeks working around their other duties to remove the dump bed from the military surplus truck, strip it down to bare metal, repair and modify it to fit on the new chassis, paint it, and then install it on the new Freightliner chassis.
Attaching the refurbished bed to the Freightliner required a conversion kit for the lift and rebuilding the old hydraulic cylinders for an additional $3000.
The total cost for the new dump truck is around $33,000.
“A brand new dump truck would have cost about $120,000,” said Eckerle, “but for what we use these trucks for, we’ll get 15 to 20 years of use from them even though they have such high mileage.”
The department is converting the second truck currently, saving an additional $90,000 for the city and department.
The two retired military surplus vehicles will be available with many other items at the city auction to be held at the Street Department, 305 Clay St., this Saturday starting at 8:30 a.m.
This is the way to do it. Until the economy recovers, even our government has to think like Dave Ramsey. Minimize spending on things like this as much as possible. The people don’t have much left, if the Federal won’t help us out the State and local governments at least need to reduce spending. Way to go Raymie and Street Dept!