by Geoff Fox
With the recent arrival of the first of five new vehicles for the Hancock Police Department, the current fleet of police vehicles will be heading to new owners.
Town Manager Mike Faith said those vehicles will be auctioned off around the end of the month.
Faith said another vehicle is set to arrive next week with another three later with license plate readers, which can tell if a plate is expired or suspended.
However, those three could be coming to Hancock without the readers as they are on backorder.
“So what we’re going to do is, we’re go ahead and take delivery of the vehicles, as it may be a couple months before we see the license plate readers,” Faith said.
Because the town has already paid for those vehicles, Faith said they didn’t want to let the vehicles sit down there, so they’ll go ahead and put the vehicles into service.
Once the readers come in, the vehicles will head down one at a time to get the readers installed.
Faith said it would cost possibly another $2,800 per car, but there’s still money from the USDA grant to pay for those installations.
“It shouldn’t take anything out of the general fund,” he said.
At the July town meeting, town officials said the old police vehicles would be auctioned off sometime in August, which would be when all five of the new vehicles would be fully in service.
A couple of the old vehicles -the Tahoes and the Crown Victoria- are done, but the two pickups still need to be stripped.
“Once they’re all stripped down, we’re going to auction,” he said.
When the vehicle auction rolls around, Faith said it will be open to the general public and anyone can bid on the vehicles.
Faith said the auction would try to get as money as possible for those vehicles to save taxpayers money.
As of the town meeting on July 9, Sgt. Shawn Faith said the company is finishing up the second vehicle and “there’s no way” all the vehicles would be done by the end of July when they had originally planned for the auction.
National Night Out
Tuesday, August 6, is National Night Out in Widmeyer Park, Sgt. Faith said.
The event is still in the planning stages, but one thing has been decided –fireworks will be set off once it gets dark.
