The Wheatland Town Board last week approved the purchase of a pumper truck for the Wheatland Vol. Fire Department.
The 2016 Rosenbauer truck is being purchased from a suburban Minneapolis fire department. Cost is $450,000. The board will use $250,000 in American Rescue Plan grant funds and finance the rest of the purchase with a bank loan, said town Chairman Brett Butler.
The truck has about 13,000 miles on it, said Chief Lou Denko at last week’s Town Board meeting.
“It hasn’t been used a lot,” Denko said of the new truck.
Wheatland VFD’s 30-year-old truck that will be replaced has about 27,000 miles.
Some equipment will be able to be transferred from the old pumper truck to the new pumper truck. One of the exceptions is radio equipment. Denko also recommended new tires for the new truck, at a cost of about $5,000.
A comparable new pumper truck would likely cost about $900,000, Denko said. The truck that will be replaced cost about $270,000 in 1994.
The department expects to be able to get over 20 years more of service from the truck the town is purchasing, Denko said.
The town had expected to get about five years more out of the older pumper, Butler said, but a recent need for a repair that would cost about $30,000 prompted the department to look at getting another truck.
“It was best to not start investing in a 30-year-old truck,” Denko said.
The older truck also was not a good candidate for a major refurbishment — as Salem Lakes Fire/Rescue recently decided to under take for one of its older pumpers — because its original manufacturer is no longer in business, Butler said.
