Indy Week’s Samiha Khanna reports that a boneheaded purchasing move several years ago by the City of Durham has resulted in a net loss of more than $120,000 to taxpayers. The person who decided to buy three 2006 trucks for the solid waste department — trucks that weren’t used for a variety of reasons detailed in the story — left the city and that seems to be the end of it. Here’s the result, according to Khanna’s story:

The city couldn’t unload the 2006 Chevy trucks on other nearby municipalities or through an online auction. So instead of scooping up bulky items and downed tree limbs over the past four years, the trucks sat parked, depreciating rapidly, until they were recently auctioned for $29,000 apiece—32 percent of the original price. Each truck had fewer than 1,000 miles on it.

A 68 percent-off sale! A great deal for the buyer, Chapman’s Automotive in Hillsborough, which snapped up the trucks at the auction. A bad deal for Durham’s taxpayers, who don’t like to see government officials make mistakes with their money, a scarce commodity these days.

At the least the city has put in place a process to catch this kind of thing before it happens again.

The year after Davis bought the trucks, the City Council enacted a Fleet Replacement Program to manage and monitor the proper maintenance and replacement of the 2,100-plus vehicles the city uses. Any purchases now have to go through a lot of checkpoints, requiring input from the city’s fleet and financial managers.

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