Last Monday, the Parsons City Commission met for its last regular meeting of the year.
While handling payment ordinances, Mayor Verlyn Bollinger said he wanted to bring a topic to the commission for discussion.
“I wanted to bring something up,” Bollinger said. “We have a lot of mechanic bills.”
Bollinger noted that there were numerous mechanic shops handling various repairs.
“What do you think we could do?” Bollinger asked. “I suggested a long time ago we should bid it out, but I don’t know if that is the right course of action.”
City Manager Jeff Cantrell said that many departments are going out to get competitive bids. Currently, the City’s Public Works department maintains the vehicle fleet, with two full-time mechanics.
“What I would like to look at is maybe adding two positions in a lube rack capacity,” Cantrell said. “The shop — where they are getting bottled up — is on these big pieces of equipment, where you break them down, and it takes days and weeks to break them down.”
Canrell said that many pieces of equipment require searching extensively for parts due to their age.
“So, you get one mechanic that’s locked down, normally your chief mechanic, searching for those parts, so that we can go fetch those and put them back into the unit to make it operational again. Meanwhile, the other departments have very basic needs most of the time — oil changes, tune-ups, brakes — and those are the ones that are going out to other private vendors,” Cantrell said.
Cantrell said the city’s shop does not have the capacity to work on the entire fleet.
“As far as the cost or breakeven analysis, unless we’re getting into some pretty specialized equipment, where we’re going to need computers and software to run the troubleshooting equipment… it may be cost advantageous for us to do that for just oil changes, and brakes,” Cantrell said. “But when we get into the diagnostic troubleshooting, where you have the big, fancy equipment, you just almost have to go to a dealer or somebody that does that or owns that licensing for that equipment.”
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Cantrell noted that vehicles under warranty are simple to take to the dealership for repairs, and said that compared to other organizations, the number of mechanics on staff is very small.
“It’s a problem that we have. Definitely a problem we have,” Cantrell said. “I think we could take a little time and ferret out some of these bills and see if it would be advantageous for us to have two additional positions. I don’t think one would be enough.”
When asked if there was room in the shop to accommodate additional mechanics, Cantrell said there was.
“That’s a real juggling act, whether it’s work having the people or worth paying someone else to do it,” Commissioner Leland Crooks said.
Bollinger said they’d wait to hear if it would be a cost-effective proposal, and go from there.
In other business, commissioners heard a report from Economic Development Director Jim Zaleski on how a portion of economic development funds will be used moving forward to support local attractions that provide activities for residents to do.
“We actually have a quality of life line item for 2026 in the economic development budget,” Zaleski said. “What I would like to do is move to a standard $10,000 each for the golf course, he movie theater, and the bowling alley.”
He noted that the idea was originally brought up years ago, and was called a tax rebate; a portion of city taxes went toward assisting those operations.
“All you have to do is look at a line item for a public golf course in another city, and it’s got five zeros in it,” Zaleski said. “We’re getting away with a small amount of tax rebate…When we start to talk about answering the question ‘what is there to do in Parsons?’ We are putting our money where our mouth is. We want to keep things for people to do in Parsons.”
Zaleski said this is a way to help people and said that if it were a slippery slope, he was willing to step out on it. Already, Zaleski said several businesses downtown received assistance from economic development funds to stay sustainable.
“Our population is marginal to support those kinds of businesses,” Crooks said, and noted that he was happy to do what he could to support those businesses, short of providing all of their operating capital.
The next Parsons City Commission meeting will take place on Monday, Jan. 5, at 6 p.m. in the City Commission Room at City Hall, 112 S. 17th St., Parsons. All meetings and work sessions are uploaded to the City of Parsons, Kansas Channel on vimeo.com.
