Roanoke Rapids City Council will consider at its next regular meeting whether to purchase a new or used limb-leaf yard loader for the public works department following discussion of the matter during its work session Tuesday night.
Also called a wheel loader, the equipment is used at the city’s limb and leaf yard off Sam Powell Dairy Road, department Director Larry Chalker wrote in the documentation for the machinery.
It is used almost daily for pushing the massive amount of leaves the city collects into a pile.
The current wheel loader is a 1997 Volvo L50C model which the city purchased used in 2003.
It has a 1 ¾ yard bucket and the equipment has 8,464 hours of use.
Six years ago the engine received a top engine rebuild but now it is weak, smokes heavily and the transmission is slipping. “We’ve probably got our money’s worth,” he said.
Chalker told the council that a good used loader comes in the price range of $90,000 while a new one is between $150,000 to $175,000.
He said the market for used equipment is currently tight and there is the possibility of leasing. “We’ve discussed looking at leasing to see if it’s better to lease a new machine,” he said.
The current machine, he said, “Appears to be coming to its end.”
Meanwhile, Chalker told the council the department is seeking approval to sell 10 used vehicles and pieces of equipment through the website govdeals.com
“Through normal attrition, along with the arrival of leased Enterprise vehicles, we have taken several vehicles out of service,” he said in the memo outlining the need for the council to act at its next regular meeting.
In the staff comments section of the memo it is stated, “We have been using govdeals.com for several years now. Staff feels that using govdeals.com has greatly improved our results when auctioning off surplus equipment and vehicles.”
Chalker told the panel that the equipment under consideration for auction are mainly pickups which are in bad shape.
He said, however, Enterprise would like to look at the vehicles since there is a used vehicle shortage.
