TUPPER LAKE — The village board is moving forward on buying a new fire truck.

At Monday’s special board meeting, Mayor Paul Maroun said he had met with the fire committees and Chief Carl Steffen, and that the group was in consensus that the village should begin the bid process for an approximately $330,000 pumper truck that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 gallons of water.

“We already have a fairly new tanker, and the pumper is the first one on the scene usually,” Maroun said in an interview Tuesday. “You have to have a Class A pumper on scene.”

Maroun said the board wants to set the process in motion as a bond resolution beyond five years would require a 30-day permissive referendum, which allows the community to contest the sale or lease of village property.

He added that there should be no additional effect on taxes, largely because town and village taxpayers are already saving up money for a truck.

“What we have in our fire contract with the town right now, the town puts in $15,000 a year, and we put in $15,000 a year,” he said. “We’re on the second year of our fire contract, so in May, we will have $60,000. We are taking the sale of the old fire station, which is $70,000, so that’ll give us $130,000. And the payment (for the truck), should be, we’re anticipating, around $30,000 a year.”

Maroun said the town will also sell its oldest truck, which he expects to bring in an additional $5,000 to $10,000.

Village Clerk Mary Casagrain said the village could either borrow money by issuing municipal bonds or go out for a lease, but a lease would require a financial analysis. Historically, the bond rates are cheaper than the lease, she said.

The special meeting was prompted by a presentation at the board’s January meeting by Dan Olszanski, vice president of Adirondack Emergency Vehicles, which is a dealer for Ferrara Fire Equipment. That company is expected to bid on selling the village a truck.

The Tupper Lake Volunteer Fire Department currently owns trucks from 1983, 1994 and 1995, which are supposed to be replaced after 25 years of age, Steffen said.

Village trustee Ron LaScala raised concerns that the village would use bid specifications from the Ferrara proposal that said Ferrara could deliver a truck in 90 days. He said that would be unfair to other manufacturers in the search.

“If you’re going to buy a truck, let’s make sure we have the bid specs right,” LaScala said. “I know you guys worked on this for a long a time, and I’m not saying you guys haven’t done your due diligence. I just want to make sure when we send something out for bid, that it’s what the board wants as well.”

Casagrain said the board can fine-tune the bid specifications by next week’s meeting. Steffen added that the specifications are not restrictive and will not exclude manufacturers.

The board agreed it would rather own than lease a vehicle as the lease would require two bid processes and most likely be more expensive.

“We talked about it earlier, the politics of buying a fire truck,” LaScala said. “You never know who is going to be on the next board five years from now. So if you’re bonding something for 10 years, the current town board agrees they’ll chip in for it, and then the new board comes in, and then they say, ‘No they don’t want to pay for it.’ Every fire contract is negotiable.”

Trustee Clint Hollingsworth said the village should try to pay off the truck as soon as possible and not make payments for as long as 15 years. Casagrain said she will get quotes for seven and 10 years.

Trustee LaScala said seven years seems like the best loan period as it would help the village reinstate its vehicle replacement program.

“The optimal way of doing it is to spread the (trucks) out in age, which is what we used to do,” Steffen said. “We replaced them every seven years, so your front-run truck was front-run for seven years. Then it would move back to the second slot, then from the second to the third, so by the time you got done, you only had 21 years on a truck.”