For years, the cost of employing third-party operators to pull stones, grit, grease, sludge and other debris out of Milledgeville water and sewer lines has sucked money out of the city’s operating fund, but now city administrators have taken steps to keep that money right where it is.

The City of Milledgeville recently invested preapproved Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax dollars — about $251,737 of them — in the purchase of a Vac-Con Combination Sewer Cleaner Vacuum Truck to upgrade the level of services the city’s water and sewer is able to provide in-house and to better maintain and diagnose problems in the city’s network of water and sewer lines.

“This Vac-Con vacuum truck will help us perform preventative maintenance on our sewer and storm drains,” Milledgeville Superintendent of Water Distribution Kevin Veal told The Union-Recorder last week. “When you talk about the cost of [renting a truck or paying a private company to provide these services], this purchase is going to save the city a lot of money in the long run.”

The city’s new Vac-Con combination truck not only is able to suck out almost any kind of debris that can clog a water or sewer line, it can shoot a jet of water to clear out clogged lines, cut roots that have infiltrated terra cotta water lines and even send a video camera into the line to help diagnose a problem in real time.

Vac-Con Sales Technician Anthony Gaylord, who was on hand last week to help train the city’s new equipment operators Raymond Davis and Jim Fields on operating the truck, told The Union-Recorder that the vacuum truck has a number of efficiency and safety features that will add to the city’s long-term savings as well as provide for the safety of those city personnel operating the truck.

“I like to say that we were green before it became popular,” he said.

The truck’s vacuum operation consumes less fuel than other trucks that run the vacuum off the full operation of the truck’s engine and the vacuum and jet operations work while the truck is in neutral to reduce wear on the transmission. To increase safety, the truck will not begin operations until the parking brake has been set, and all of the truck’s vacuum and jet operations can be killed by one switch, which is positioned right at the operator’s fingertips.

“I’ve been running these trucks for 13 years, and I think the city is going to love it,” said truck operator Jim Fields, who the city recently hired for the expressed purpose of operating the vacuum truck. “At the last city I worked in, we had one of these trucks strictly for sewer lines, and we loved it so much that after three or four years the city bought another for storm water lines.”

Gaylord said that although the city will probably like the truck enough to want to buy another, that probably won’t be necessary.

“I recently went to a city in California that was still using the 18th truck Vac-Con built,” he said.

The truck the City of Milledgeville recently purchased is the 5,399th truck to roll off Vac-Con’s Green Coves Spring, Fla.-assembly line.