Crossfield CAO Cheryl Skelly called the Town’s new street sweeper amazing at the June 4 council meeting.
“It does a really good job,” she said.
Director of Operations Kelly Carlson agrees, saying the new sweeper is easy to operate and a very good unit.
“The guys are happy and they love running it,” he added.
The new street cleaner is a Tymco Regenerative Air System 435 Air Sweeper and acts like a giant vacuum, sucking up small pieces of debris material, which older machines would miss.
“It’s a closed-loop system so all the dirt and dust that goes into the hopper doesn’t go back out into the environment,” Carlson said of the new Tymco.
He said the older sweeper was a mechanical sweeper that used two gutter brooms and one larger main broom to sweep debris into the hopper.
The old machines were high maintenance, produced a lot of dust and were incapable of getting the smaller particles of dust and dirt, which often fall into cracks, Carlson said.
The new Tymco will have about half the maintenance cost of the old machine, is quieter to operate and can be used in the rain.
“It does a very good job,” he said.
“It picks up the finer material and leaves the road surface very clean.”
The Town opted to purchase the new sweeper after maintenance costs for the old machine became too high.
“The old one was very old and was high maintenance because all the components were in dust and salt and were beginning to rust,” Carlson said.
“It was just costing more to maintain it then it was worth,” he added.
Last year, the Town had to contract out the street cleaning because they did not have a working sweeper.
The contract service only came at scheduled times, but with the new Tymco in Town the streets are looking sharp thanks to the ability to clean the streets whenever they need it.
The sweeper is being leased under a seven-year lease agreement, which will cost the Town about $22,000 per year.
Council allocated the funding for the sweeper for the length of the lease.
Carlson said the new sweeper is relatively unique for the area with only a few municipalities using the new technology.
He said Crossfield is acting somewhat as the trial for other areas and adds the sweeper has, “Worked great so far.”
