Cash-strapped Yonkers taps online auctions

With hundreds of thousands of dollars in surplus property gathering dust in warehouses across the city, Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano has found a faster way to unload the city's unwanted merchandise and help close budget gaps.

Working with online auction house eBay.com, the city is planning to reach out to a larger pool of potential buyers to sell surplus vehicles and equipment.

Yonkers used to just list its surplus goods for sale in newspaper classifieds or unload them at public auctions. But city officials say selling items online is cheaper and less cumbersome, and vastly expands the pool of bidders.

"We're taking items that the city no longer needs and trying to make the best use of it by selling it online," said Christina Gilmartin, Spano's spokeswoman.

She said the city will initially list a few dozen items on the auction site including employee take-home vehicles that Spano took off the road earlier this year. The mayor is hoping the revenue can help pay down the city's $89 million deficit.

One of the vehicles to be auctioned beginning Wednesday is a 2008 Lincoln Navigator, with about 19,000 miles, which was seized in a gang bust, Gilmartin said. Bids will be starting at $24,000. "It's souped-up, too," she said.

Other items include cameras, computers, paintings, traffic lights and even an old punch clock from City Hall.

Yonkers isn't the only municipality hawking goods online. With the struggling economy, more cash-strapped state and local governments are using the Web to clear out inventory and bolster deflated operating budgets.

Combined with traditional auctions, the state says online ventures have brought in $3.5 million up to October 2011. Earlier this year, New York State launched its own dedicated e-commerce site, www.nysstore.com, in collaboration with eBay.

"Some of the more unique items received for disposal are: airplanes, helicopters, a lobster boat, 1950s fire trucks, and granite cobblestones recently removed from roads and pathways," the city's new eBay website reads.

The New York Police Department is one of 2,700 municipal law enforcement agencies across the country that have contracts with The Property Room, a police auction website that sells everything from computers to old patrol cars to paintings.

And on the government auction website www.GovDeals.com, which hawks surplus for the federal government, consumers can find everything from helicopters to armored personnel carriers to cranes, and smaller items from desks to printers.