Like you, I’m tired of taxes going up every year. This year at Town Meeting, I’m trying to do something about it by asking the Town of Andover to purchase a backhoe-loader. Almost every small town like Andover saves money by owning its own backhoe-loader, and it’s time Andover did, too.

Here’s the choice I’ll propose at Town Meeting:

We can budget about $100,000 every year forever for equipment rental and spend most of it on renting the Road Agent’s backhoe-loader.

Or we can spend about $150,000 this year to own our own backhoe-loader. It should last us 20 years. It will pay for itself in about a year and a half, and then it will save us a lot of money every year – we spent almost $100,000 to rent the Road Agent’s backhoe-loader in 2016.

The purchase price includes a five-year warranty plus five years of routine maintenance. The company that we’d buy the backhoe-loader from is used to working on-site, so they don’t need a garage to work on it in.

Savings and Flexibility

I’ve done a lot of research, and we can buy a 2017 Caterpillar 420FIT backhoe-loader with thumb, a tilting ditching bucket, and forks with a grapple for about $141,000. That includes the $15,000 we save by buying through a municipal buying association.

The new backhoe-loader would be operated by anybody who’s qualified. The operator would be paid out of the money that the Town budgets every year to pay the operators of the equipment we rent from the Road Agent.

Besides saving money off everyone’s tax bill, owning our own backhoe-loader would also give the Selectboard and the Road Agent a lot more flexibility in tackling projects around town and save even more money, just like our two full-time Highway Department employees and their truck, mowers, etc. do.

Please Stay and Vote Yes

To get this plan going, I put a petitioned warrant article on the warrant for Town Meeting that just says “To raise and appropriate $150,000 for a Town backhoe/loader and accessories.” It will probably be one of the last warrant articles to be considered.

I hope you’ll stay through the meeting until this warrant article comes up and that you’ll vote to save money on your tax bill for many years to come by voting for this article. Thank you.

Herbie Barton, Andover resident