Supervisors OK new equipment approved for county engineer

Several pieces of equipment used to assemble a tandem axle truck with a dump box and pup were approved for purchase on Tuesday. The Jasper County Board of Supervisors selected low bids from Henderson Products, Nuzum Services and Houseby Mack for a total of $188,700 to provide parts and construct the new piece of machinery.

Henderson Products of Manchester presented a bid of $55,600 for a 16 foot Henderson Mark E Dump Body, 11 foot by 36 foot Henderson reversible snow plow, tailgate spreader, certified power hydraulics and controls and professional installation of all equipment. Also added to the bid is a 7 gauge 2010 SS body and pup trailer hook-up.

To accompany the truck box, Nuzum Services of Baxter was selected to provide an aluminum pup chassis with steel tube construction and a premier 430 front pivot. The total for the pup and necessary parts came in at $35,892. Nuzum also was asked to bid on the truck box, but Jasper County Engineer Russ Stutt said Nuzum felt it was beyond the scope of what they normally deal with.

The final piece approved for the truck was the tandem cab chassis. Houseby Mack of Des Moines had the lowest of two bids received at $97,200. The bid was reduced by $8,000 following at trade in of an old county truck Stutt said.

The new truck will be paid for using funds from the fiscal year 2017 budget.

“It actually came in at about $11,000 less than what we budgeted for,” Stutt said.

Also purchased for the engineer department was a motorgrader from Murphy Equipment for $66,125.

“It is one of the pieces that we had and sold back to them. The buy back that they gave us a few years ago was $128,000,” Stutt said. “They had it listed for $122,500 they just recently dropped it to $96,125. So, they dropped the price considerably.”

The price was further reduced $30,000 with the trade in of an older six-wheel drive machine from the county.

“We had estimated $100,000, so it came in considerably less,” Stutt said.

Last on the engineer’s list was the bid for the new maintenance building to be constructed in Reasnor. Griner Buildings was approved at $174,500 to serve as the contractor of the five stall building. Griner has previously worked on the past three buildings constructed and has a good working relationship with the county.

The price was slightly higher than what was estimated but Stutt thought it was reasonable for the work being done.

“The first couple they built, county workers put in more time to build it, lowering the cost. This one more was put into the contract to keep the county workers time free and available for other work,” assistant to the engineer, Pamela Olson said.

In other business:

• The Newton Chamber of Commerce was approved to use the courthouse lawn for the annual Fourth of July celebration.

• A new part-time position in planning and zoning was approved.

Contact Jamee A. Pierson at
641-792-3121 ext. 6534 or jpierson@newtondailynews.com