The recent purchase of a used 2002 Sterling hydro-excavation truck for $100,000 from Red Municipal & Industrial Equipment Company in Kansas City, Mo. without prior approval caused a few sparks at the Oct. 15 meeting of the Ellsworth City Council.

“I don’t think we ever said to buy it, did we?” council member Tyler Renard asked.“We had no idea what it even was going to cost. I’d just like a little heads up. I’d like to know before the meeting when you spend that kind of coin.”

Renard said he didn’t think the truck was a bad purchase.

“I just wanted to know,” he added.

Mayor Al Stefek said the whole thing boiled down to the fact that city administrator Scott Moore should have called the council members and told them the truck was found.

“We realize it’s going to take some money,” Stefek said.

“I did shop around,” said Joe Travnichek, the city’s water and sewer superintendent.“I spent a bunch of time talking with dealers, looking at pictures and looking at videos. Talking to people who knew about these trucks — people in the bigger cities — Wichita, Topeka, Kansas City — finding out what is good, what is bad.”

Travnichek said he had a checklist of items he looked at when considering the truck.

“Scott did say go up there, if you want it, if it works for us and it’s a good piece of equipment, bring it home and we’ll figure it out,” Travnichek said.

The truck will be used jet clean sewer lines and hydro-vac dirt in Ellsworth so city crews won’t have to do as much digging with the sewer lines.

Travnichek said Ellsworth needs the equipment on site to take care of backed up sewers right away when they’re found, instead of waiting for a truck and crew from Wichita, which takes hours to get to Ellsworth and charges $400 per hour.

“I know we ran into this issue the last time when we had a truck and it wasn’t available,” said council member Mark Kennedy.“We could sure do anything we could to call a special meeting to get that approved, going through the correct channels for purchasing. That’s my concern about that.”

Kennedy said he didn’t wish to raise a “big storm” over the issue.

“I think we were all totally onboard with it,” he said.“It’s definitely something we wanted to explore.”

Patrick Hoffman, city attorney, cautioned the council to be careful not to violate the Kansas Open Meetings Act.

Specifically, Hoffman said the council should not call each other to discuss something brought up at an open meeting.

“It would be an instinctive thing to do — to run it by each other, but you can’t do that without violating the open meetings act,” he said.

After the meeting, Moore attempted to clarify the truck issue for the Independent-Reporter.

“It’s a big expenditure,” he said. “Normally, anything of that size we have bids that they (the city council) see.”

Going back through the budget process, Moore said he and the council talked about looking for such a truck.

“So Joe took the lead and started looking at different proposals,” Moore said.

If one is found, the question then becomes how much time does the city have to secure it before it is sold to somebody else.

“We had saw a truck that was on hold for us during the budget process back in July,” he said. “We had the budget meeting on July 29. The following day, the guy said he sold it (the truck) on the 29th. So we would have asked the council then, if the truck was still available at the Aug. 12 meeting, but it was already pretty much spoken for. So we’ve been looking ever since August to find something. These trucks are hard to come by that are in decent shape and that can do what we do.”

Moore said the biggest thing for the city is the overall expense that it has for emergencies.

“It’s almost $60,000 that we’ve spent in just reaction,” he said.“This machine will allow us to be more proactive in taking care of our (sewer) system.”

Moore said during the budget process, he makes sure he identifies those items for the council, which saves them from coming back later and saying they didn’t know anything about it.

“Joe had been onboard with us less that four months,” Moore said. “He saw the bills we had in 2018 and some in 2019 to date that were well over $40,000, and said why can’t we do this?”

Moore said during the budget, part of the conversation was that Ellsworth could use the truck since it has a multi-purpose use for the city.