JOHN DAY — The John Day City Council’s search for an engineer of record for the city appears to have come to an end.

The council voted unanimously to move forward with Coos Bay-based Dyer Partnership Engineers & Planners Inc. as the city’s contract engineer of record at its Feb. 25 meeting. John Day City Manager Melissa Bethel said the city had four responses from engineering firms to its request for proposals for a city engineer.

Bethel said one of those respondents was not a good fit for the job, leaving Dyer as the best option of the three remaining.

“They are currently working on a couple planning issues for us that we needed to hurry up and get somebody on board separately, so they’re already familiar with the city,” Bethel said at the meeting.

The city said it expects its contract engineer to work 15-20 hours per week.

The council also unanimously approved a request by John Day Public Works Director Casey Myers for repairs to the city’s combination sewer truck.

The truck’s blower assembly went out in November of last year. Myers said the truck is a very important piece of equipment as it is the only machine the city has that can remedy backups to the city’s sewer lines.

Myers asked the city to either replace or repair the truck’s blower assembly as opposed to purchasing a new truck. Myers said he was only able to get cost estimates for the work and not direct price quotes.

A rebuilt blower unit is estimated to set the city back $23,700 while a brand new motor would cost just over $45,000. The rebuilt part would carry a 30-day warranty while a new motor would be warrantied for 90 days.

Repairs to the blower unit would be performed by Gresham-based Enviro-Clean.

Myers said he looked into simply replacing the city’s truck, a 1999 model, but the cost was prohibitive. A used truck would cost the city $300,000, while a brand new truck would be somewhere in the range of $625,000.

The turnaround time for either a rebuilt or new blower is two to three weeks.

Myers said he has an arrangement with Prairie City’s public works director for the use of the town’s sewer truck should the need arise. Prairie City would also need to send one of its own public works employees to run the truck as none of John Day’s public works employees are trained to operate Prairie City’s truck.

“He would send his truck over and we could use his truck in the case of an emergency,” Myers said.

Myers advised the council to start setting aside money to purchase a new or used truck in the future.