WESTLOCK – The Town of Westlock will explore gifting its now-redundant 1987 Ford/Thibault ladder truck to a service club with the hopes it will get a new lease on life in a developing country.
At their April 12 meeting, councillors voted 6-0 (Coun. Murtaza Jamaly was absent) to let administration explore donating the municipality’s old ladder truck, while selling the 1977 Ford/Superior fire truck and the support van — all three are currently housed in Jubilee Arena.
Fire chief Stuart Koflick noted in his request for decision to council that the 1987 truck has reached its end of life as required under current North American standards, but can still be used in other countries like Mexico. In addition, the town recently added its new $1.3 million 2020 Rosenbauer Cobra Aerial Platform truck to the fleet, making the old one redundant.
“There’s a number of Rotary Clubs that participate in sending surplus fire apparatus south of the border … so they can retire, but still have some active service providing safety and protection to other communities,” said Koflick, who included a number of articles in his RFD detailing how Rotary Clubs around Alberta have been involved, and will now be in contact with the Westlock club.
“There is quite a bit of logistics involved with something like this so it’s not going to be easy.”
Ultimately councillors liked the idea, but cautioned that it may not happen if the process gets too time consuming, or costs the municipality money.
“I have read numerous articles that there are lots of logistics involved and that not every gift is present, if you know what I mean. But it would be great if we could make it work,” said mayor Ralph Leriger.
Added Coun. Curtis Snell, who made the motion: “This is a great idea and there’s good intentions. But if we are donating it I want to make sure it doesn’t cost us a lot of time and money.”
Koflick went on to state that they had hoped to do something with the other fire truck, which was replaced in 2010/11 and support van, but those plans won’t come to fruition. As per town policy those pieces of equipment will be sold either by bid, or at an auction — whichever generates the most for the municipality.
“We’ve been slowly collecting surplus vehicles with the intention of doing something cool with them — we had talked about turning one of them into a rolling barbeque with non-public funds raised from donations. But I think the time has passed for that just based on the economic climate and our interest,” said Koflick.
“And if we don’t find a suitable organization to donate the (ladder) truck to we would simply follow the policy,” added CAO Simone Wiley.
