The town of Dresden is auctioning off two of its old fire trucks in order to shore up its coffers.

The 1991 Volvo AutoCar tanker/pumper and 1975 Pierce pumper refurbished in 1996 are up for auction at municibid.com, an online auction marketplace for local government agencies and schools to sell their surplus, forfeitures or confiscated items directly to the public.

According to Michael Faass, Dresden town administrator, the town recently purchased a new pumper truck worth $280,000 that replaced these two old fire trucks, so officials decided to auction off the older models.

 

Faass added that the funds drawn from the auctions will go back into the town’s reserve fund to be used for community programs and other public safety initiatives.

“We used some of the money out of our cash reserves to purchase the new fire truck, so whenever we collect the money off of the old trucks, it will go back into the reserves. It’s like we borrowed from ourselves,” said Faass. However, he refused to say how much money was used from the cash reserve fund.

According to municibid.com, the pierce pumper truck has 16,000 miles on it and has a current bid of $2,000 with three bids as of July 21. The AutoCar by Volvo-White/GMC tanker/pumper has 19,000 miles and has a bid of $5,500 with six bids.

“Both these fire trucks are in a decent, operational condition. The tanker originally cost $163,000 and the pierce pumper was $16,000,” said Dresden Fire Chief Steve Lilly. “After we bought a new fire truck, we thought we had surplus equipment so we decided to either sell it to another department or auction it off. The fire department used the tanker for almost 31 years to haul water, and the pierce pumper truck was the mainline engine to fight all kinds of fires.”

The online auction for the pierce pumper truck will end on Friday, the AutoCar tanker/pumper auction will end on Monday.

Greg Berry, the founder of municibid.com, said, “We have designed our website in such a way that the general public can conveniently use it. Anyone who is 18 and above in the United States or Canada can register for an account and place a bid from anywhere.”

According to Berry, fire trucks, in general, are an exciting thing. “It depends on what the buyer intends to do with these trucks. We have people who buy fire trucks to collect them, and others buy them to use on their farms. Sometimes we have companies that buy these trucks for their parts or scrap. There is a big market for these trucks.”

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