Mello Testa is Oneida County’s Director of Purchasing. He’s a huge Yankees fan and has built up an incredible bobblehead collection over the past few years. The online auction site Ebay was where Testa found most of his bobbleheads and Yankees collectibles. In 2004, he started to wonder if EBay could be an option to the traditional surplus auctions his department organizes. "It started out with selling everyday items, office furniture, old typewriters, “ said Testa “and four and half years later we’ve hit the million dollar mark.”
Testa says they found that a lot of things that didn’t sell for much at traditional county surplus auctions did very well online. "An old snowplow that went for maybe a thousand dollars, now maybe it's three or four thousand dollars."
That was just the beginning for what has turned into a massive program that now assists several area counties with their online auctions. Testa and his assistant now sell old refrigerators, seized motorcycles, phones, toys and snowplows. When they sell an item for another county, Testa’s office receives twenty percent of the final sale price. They also learned some things along the way. It turns out that old chairs used for jurors in a courtroom are perfect for people looking to build a home theater. There are a few critics of the program according to Testa.
"There are some people that obviously don't like what we're doing because it opens up the competition. Maybe they were the ones who bought locally all the time. They were the ones who bought that sheriff's car for fifteen hundred dollars, now it's selling for twenty five hundred dollars."-
Testa says his office has saved Oneida County three or four percent on the property tax rate.
