Fort Oglethorpe buys 3 new trucks, deems trailer surplus

The city of Fort Oglethorpe has agreed to purchase three new trucks for its Public Works Department and deemed an old, unused trailer as surplus.

During the Nov. 25 City Council meeting, Public Works Director Jeff Long presented bid recommendations to the board regarding new three new vehicles.

“We’re requesting tonight to purchase three pickup trucks — two of these will be for the street department and one will be for the recreation department,” Long explained. “We packaged them all into one bid and we opened the bids on Nov. 21.”

Long said there were multiple bids for the vehicles and that staff did its due diligence in trying to select the right vehicles.

“There were four vendors and after reviewing the bids, the staff recommends purchasing the three trucks from Jenkins Chrysler Dodge Jeep Inc. in the amount of $28,984 each. The total price will be $86,952,” Long said.

Long pointed out that Jenkins had the second-lowest bid, but they opted to go with them over the lowest bidder due to the low bid not fully meeting city staff’s needs and quality.

In addition to unanimously approving the vehicle purchases, the council also unanimously approved Police Chief Mike Helton’s request to surplus an old trailer in order to allow Lakeview-fort Oglethorpe High School’s agriculture students to benefit from it.

“We came in contact with this trailer in 2016. It’s just been sitting on our back lot,” Helton explained. “The original circumstances involved officers being called to the scene a suspicious trailer being left on a business property. The trailer was minus its identification numbers and we had no way of being able to identify an owner and still to date have never been able to identify an owner.”

Helton says the department went through the proper channels to officially obtain ownership.

“Early this year, we went through the process in Superior Court and obtained ownership of the property,” Helton explained. “Its value is less than $500 and we don’t want to put the money into it to recoup the use of it. It just costs too much money for us.

“We’ve determined that there’s a great use for it at Lakeview-fort Oglethorpe High School, where their students can do rebuild projects and things in their agriculture department all the time.”