Got one police cruiser too many hanging around that you need to get rid of? How about that Porsche 911 that law enforcement officers confiscated, and now you need to get it off your hands? Or perhaps you need a police car, or a dump truck?
An option available to N.C. League of Municipalities members is GovDeals.com, an online auction site that is "really a tailored approach for governments," said Bob Bowen of GovDeals.
"It's just so convenient for folks to go online and look up items."
The League has joined other municipal leagues as organizations that endorse GovDeals.
Like other Internet auction sites, such as eBay, GovDeals allows people (or in this case, governments) to put items up for sale online. Those items are then competitively fought over in a bidding process. But unlike eBay and others, GovDeals caters strongly to local governments.
GovDeals costs nothing to register, requiring just a phone number, mailing address and email address. (No financial information is needed when registering.) Once registered, you can search for items you'd like to purchase, put items up for sale, or take advantage of GovDeals' special features. A bid watch selection will notify you when certain items - items that you have specified - go on sale. The site's auto bid tool will make it possible to place a bid on items when you are away from the computer. You can load your budgeted amount and then set the time you want that bid to engage. In fact, you can set it up so that your bid is not engaged until the final moments of the auction.
(City councils that use GovDeals must comply with North Carolina General Statute 160A-270 which states that: "When it is proposed to sell real property at public auction, the council shall first adopt a resolution authorizing the sale, describing the property to be sold, specifying the date, time, place, and terms of sale, and stating that any offer or bid must be accepted and confirmed by the council before the sale will be effective." And the council "may conduct auctions of real or personal property electronically by authorizing the establishment of an electronic auction procedure or by authorizing the use of existing private or public electronic auction services.")
GovDeals is a concept perfect for the smaller governments that don't have the media resources that their larger constituents have.
"Plain and simple, it gives them an equal footing with what the big cities are able to do," said Bowen. "They are able to list one police cruiser per year and get access to buyers, and they're going to see numbers that they've never seen before. It's going to provide instant access to a marketing program that's in 50 states and foreign countries."
Go to www.GovDeals.com for more information.
