Cobb officials bend rules on dump trucks

Moon championed the purchase while Hankerson approved it to go before the Board of Commissioners for a vote, according to county officials. The board, headed by then-County Chairman Sam Olens, voted unanimously to approve the deal.

The three main men involved — Moon, Nextran’s general manager and Kastner — told the AJC that the quick turnaround sale was not an attempt to conceal Kastner’s involvement.

“Absolutely not,” Moon said.

“There’s no sweetheart deal,” said Terry Barrows, general manager for Nextran.

The purchases were unusual for several other reasons:

● The county avoided its competitive bidding process on the grounds that it got a great price for the trucks, but evidence shows that others got similar deals.

● The county did not follow its own procedure for no-bid purchases.

● In the past decade, the county has not bought used dump trucks on any other occasion, but bought numerous new ones.

Public documents related to the truck purchases do not mention Kastner.

Two different documents, however, make reference to his business, saying the opportunity to buy the trucks “is the result of the closure of a mid-size trucking business.”

Hankerson and Moon say their friendship with Kastner centers on a 12-acre piece of land nicknamed “The Garden” along Dallas Highway west of Marietta.

Hankerson and Kastner’s friendship — and their connection to the Garden — was the subject of an August 2009 feature article in The Marietta Daily Journal, titled, “Garden of generosity: Two friends sow seeds of friendship, community on west Cobb land.”

Kastner owns the land, part of which includes a vegetable garden. Moon and Hankerson say the Garden is a place where they go to work the garden and socialize.

Kastner told the AJC he mentioned to Hankerson while at the Garden that he was selling his business, West Cobb Building Supply. Kastner cited two reasons for closing: Fuel had become too expensive and the economy had softened.

“We just had to get out of it,” he said.

During the conversation with Hankerson, Kastner also told him he was selling his trucks.

“The county is looking for some trucks,” Hankerson responded, according to Kastner. “I’ll mention it to [Moon].”

Hankerson, however, told the AJC he had little to no involvement with the purchases.

Moon, who reports directly to Hankerson, told the AJC that he is the one who learned from Kastner of the opportunity to buy the trucks. Moon said Kastner already had sold the trucks when he tried to buy them.

Terry Barrows, the general manager for Nextran, however, recalls the sequence differently. He said that he was negotiating with Kastner’s company while Cobb officials were doing the same.

Nextran beat the county to the punch, scooping up Kastner’s fleet of 10 trucks. But Cobb still wanted four of them.

“Mr. Kastner asked me whether I would honor his deal with the county,” Barrows said.

Kastner has a similar account. He said he offered Moon the trucks for $56,000 apiece, but sold them to Nextran because the county was slow to make a decision.

Once the trucks were in Nextran’s hands, Kastner said he asked Nextran to give the county a good deal on the trucks and that Barrows offered to sell them at cost.

Barrows would not tell the AJC how much he paid for the 10 trucks. Kastner said he could not remember the price. Both confirmed Nextran sold the four trucks to the county for the same price that Nextran paid.

Nextran bought the trucks on Feb. 28, and the county voted to buy them on March 11.

The Cobb Board of Commissioners approved the purchase on its consent agenda, a long list of actions approved in one motion and without public discussion. The vote was unanimous.

The county did not buy trucks through normal competitive bidding, arguing that Nextran was the only vendor in a position to offer a “one-time, significantly below re-sale market” price for the trucks. The county bought the trucks for $56,000 apiece.

Though that price was not out of line with market cost, the county’s deal wasn’t as good as it represented.

At the time, Cobb officials estimated “re-sale” value of the four trucks at between $70,000 and $95,000, documents show.

However, Barrows told the AJC that he sold two of Kastner’s other 2004 Mack trucks to retail customers for about $60,000 each. He sold another 2004 model to a Mack wholesale dealer for $56,000.

Those trucks were the same make and model as the ones sold to the county, and Kastner said they were in the same condition and had similar mileage.

When making its no-bid purchase, county officials should have initiated the process by filling out a “Sole Source Request” form, according to Cobb policy.

No official ever filled out the form.

Instead, Moon and another official wrote a letter to the board one day before the commissioners voted to approve the purchase.

“Since we did the letter, we said, ‘Well, we don’t need to fill out the form,’ ” Moon said.

But the purpose of that letter was to respond to questions from the Board of Commissioners about the potential purchase — not to formally request a sole source purchase.

Hankerson’s approval for sole source purchases was supposed to come by signing the form that was never completed. County officials told the AJC his approval came simply by putting the purchase on the county agenda.

While Kastner’s name is absent from county documents, current Commission Chairman Tim Lee said Kastner’s involvement was disclosed to the board, but could not remember when or by whom.

The four dump trucks had higher mileage than all the other large dump trucks owned by the county at the time, including the four older trucks the county proposed to swap out with the transaction, documents show.

Two of the new-used trucks had more than 200,000 miles — one had 216,978 — and the two others had logged 151,551 and 130,947 miles.

The highest odometer reading among the county’s fleet of large dump trucks at the time was 123,051.

The county’s response: Its dump trucks were only driven locally and, therefore, were used more intensely than Kastner’s, which were driven mostly on highways.

“We didn’t buy [Kastner’s former trucks] necessarily because of the mileage,” Moon said. “We bought them because we knew they were well-maintained. ... They were newer models.”

The county’s dump trucks that were replaced were significantly older, all models from 1988 to 1993. Of the four older models set to be replaced, the county sold three of them. The fourth is still in service.

Cobb has not purchased used dump trucks at any other time during the past 10 years, records show.

Hankerson acknowledged that the Board of Commissioners questioned why the county was proposing to buy used dump trucks.

Since the purchases in March 2008, Cobb has logged between 10,810 miles and 25,030 miles on each of the trucks, which are used to haul items for county projects, according to county spokesman Robert Quigley. Two are assigned to the county’s water system; the other two are in the transportation department.

In the end, the Board of Commissioners, not Hankerson and his county staff, made the decision to approve the purchase. Then-chairman Olens, who vacated his seat to run for attorney general, did not return calls for comment.

Lee, who took over as chairman in late July and was a commissioner in 2008, said he supported the dump trucks purchase “based on staff’s recommendation.”

When pressed further, Lee said that he did not closely scrutinize this particular purchase, relying instead on county staffers who arranged it.

“We don’t get into the weeds with staff,” he said. “We’re a board. We direct and oversee.”