Just over a month after approving its budget, the Luverne City Council agreed to three purchases that will save the city over $14,000.

Monday night, the council approved the purchase of three new city vehicles, which they budgeted to spend a total of $50,000 on. Last week, street and sanitation and water and sewer department chairman Morris Tate found three deals the council couldn't pass up.

Tate found a 1997 Ford F-150 six-cylinder pickup truck with 46,000 miles on it for $6,400, a 1997 Ford Ranger with 22,570 miles on it for $6,450 and a 1990 GMC heavy-duty flat-bed dump truck with a 3208 CAT diesel engine with 52,000 miles on it for $16,000. After presenting the specifications of the vehicles and their prices, the council was unanimous in approving the purchase of all three.

"If you can find three vehicles in that could of shape with low mileage on them, you're real fortunate," Tate said. "We just showed up at the right time."

The Streets and Sanitation Department will use the dump truck for hauling debris and one of the trucks will be used to pull a trailer around town for the city's recycling program. The Water and Sewer Department will used the other truck for meter reading and carrying water samples to Montgomery.

Tate said the two pickup trucks are part of the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs federal surplus and the dump truck was part of the State of Alabama's Department of Transportation surplus.

"When you can get all three vehicles under budget, it helps tremendously," Tate added.

Luverne Mayor Joe Rex Sport expressed the same sentiments.

"You're always happy to come under budget," Sport said. "If you come under budget, then you feel like you've met your needs. It's too early to tell how it will effect the budget, but at least it gives us that leeway to maybe utilize other needs that we weren't able to budget for because the funds weren't available."

In other business:

– Sport announced in his Mayor's Report that the Electric Board decided to purchase $7,500 of additional Christmas decorations to hang throughout the city during the holidays.

"A lot of businesses have expanded down south of town and we don't have anything down there indicating the Christmas spirit," he said. "We felt like this was something we really needed to enhance the city. Then by the same token, we expanded about five or six blocks past Hicks."

In years past, the city's Christmas decorations began at Hicks, Inc., and continued just past the Crenshaw County Courthouse, and went north to ALFA located just down from Sixth Street. With the additional decorations, the city will be able to begin at Douglas Pharmaceuticals and extend east to Turner's Funeral Home and go north to the Crenshaw County Community Hospital.

– Adopted the accounting and purchasing policies set forth by the Community Development Block Grant program.

– Adopted an equipment capitalization policy. All purchases over $1,000 are now considered capital expenditures.

– Declared the city's old bucket truck, which was replaced last year, as surplus.