HOLLIS BEND, Wis. — The Hollis Bend Village Board voted 5-0 Thursday night to adopt Resolution 26-31, the Made-Here Procurement Resolution, which requires that every good and service bought by the village be of domestic origin, and then approved $1,140,000 in purchases that met the requirement.
The vote came at 8:14 p.m., after a six-minute recess requested by Trustee Gary Hollander to “look at the paper” and a three-minute recess requested by the village clerk to find the paper. All five trustees were present, establishing a quorum, along with 14 residents and a goat that was not on the agenda and was not recorded as a resident.
The purchases included 412 tons of road salt, 90 street signs, one utility truck, and a contract for “procurement services.” The salt, signs, and truck were bought from the Village of Hollis Bend Procurement Services, a vendor registered with the village clerk on Aug. 30. According to the vendor’s filing, its sole employee is the village administrator, its sole customer is the village, and its address is Village Hall.
“Buy American means buy it from America,” said Arlene Boettcher, 61, the board’s president, who has served on the board for 14 years and has voted on every purchase in that time. “We checked. The vendor is in Hollis Bend, Hollis Bend is in America, and the vendor is us. So we are buying American, and we are buying it from ourselves, which is the most American thing a village can do.”
The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the United States imported a record $420.8 billion in goods and services in August, producing a trade deficit of $105.6 billion, the widest gap in 17 months. Trustees were asked whether the village had considered the figures. Hollander said the village had considered them “from the outside,” and that the village was “not on the outside.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the resolution was consistent with the national trend. “A village buying from itself is the most American thing I have heard all year,” Brickhouse said by phone from a hardware store, where he was buying salt. “It’s local, it’s ours, and you can’t say it isn’t. It’s just common sense.”
Under Resolution 26-31, incoming goods will be unloaded at the Village Hall loading dock, which the board reclassified Thursday as a port of entry. Because the dock is owned by the village, the village will pay itself no tariff on anything it receives there. Any tariff that is nonetheless calculated will be refunded to the village, which the resolution describes as “the importer of record, and also the record.”
Marcy Lund, the village treasurer, said the new procurement process would save the village money, though she could not say how much, because the village has never before paid itself. “We used to send the money out of town and get nothing back,” Lund said. “Now the money goes to Village Hall and comes back to Village Hall. It stays in the family. That’s the difference.”
The board recessed at 9:02 p.m. to decide whether the road salt was American salt. The motion to ask the vendor was tabled 5-0, on the grounds that the vendor was present and had not been asked.
Boettcher said the village would buy its next truck from the same vendor at the same price, “because we are trying to keep it local.” The meeting adjourned at 9:19 p.m., with the goat still present, and no one on the board asked it to leave.