Everything But The Kitchen Sink

The City of Sioux Falls and Minnehaha County are holding a surplus auction and you wouldn't believe some of the stuff up for sale.

All kinds of stuff lines this 50,000 square foot street department storage building, the parking lot, another building and another parking lot and it's all for sale. 

"When you take a look at all the city departments from health to police to fire to parks to library, media services; all electronics, streets, public works, there's a lot of different things out here and some of them are fairly unique," Sioux Falls Streets and Utilities Manager Galynn Huber said.

Unique barely covers it.

"If there's any artist out there who thinks they need a pottery wheel, here you go, here's one you can probably get a pretty good deal on," Huber said.

There's fire gear and even the department's rescue rafts.

"If you have somebody who is interested; the two rafts the fire department has here, those are really nice, probably eight to six person raft; anybody into recreation that wants to float, those are pretty decent and they're pretty spendy to buy a new one," Huber said.

Now you may be asking yourself, who in the world would want to buy the city's old street sweeping brushes? It turns out they usually sell to ranchers who put them out as scratching posts for their cattle or bison. 

Heavy equipment, including Great Bear's old half pipe machine and buses and vehicles are also up for sale.

"One year we had a person purchasing old police cars for a taxi company out of Chicago," Huber said.

Of course there's also what you'd expect, like plenty of old electronics, desks and chairs.  Brandon Valley School District brought in 192 computer monitors. The parks department is selling off old pool tables and the list goes on.

"One person's trash is one person's treasure," Huber said.

The police department's unclaimed and confiscated property, like jewelry and electronics doesn't arrive until the morning of the auction, but all tolled the sale brought in $217,000  last year with a majority of it going back into city coffers.

The auction goes from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday at the street maintenance facility, with vehicles being sold at noon.

Check out the Surplus Auction website for more information and to see the list of items that's for sale.