EVANS CITY — Things could start getting expensive for motorists who fail to move their vehicles during street cleaning days.

Council members voted unanimously to once again use Municipal Contracting Services for this year’s street cleaning services during the monthly meeting on Monday, March 4.

And while the street cleaning service may be the same, this year the borough is looking to make a change.

“There will be much better management of cars parking on the road when they’re not supposed to there,” said council president Cheri Deener-Kohan.

According to Deener-Kohan, the borough has not prioritized enforcing ordinance 577, which states “parking shall be prohibited at the time, days, and months posted for each of the streets in Evans City Borough.”

“We’re going to be working more on enforcement this year,” Deener-Kohan said. “With COVID and everything else … This was low on the totem pole. It can’t be that way anymore.”

According to the ordinance, street sweeping starts April 1 and ends Nov. 30.

Deener-Kohan said that the borough would be issuing steep fines for repeat offenders.

Fines for violating the ordinance start at $25 for the first infraction, $50 for the second, $100 for the third and $150 for each infraction thereafter.

The rate for Municipal Contracting Services is $150 an hour, a $15 increase from last year. Their cost was the least expensive of the two bids placed.

Evans City public safety department has been officially recognized as a law enforcement agency, according to public safety director Joe McCombs.

“We’re there, as far as recognized, and we’re ready to go,” McCombs said. “But we have other things to deal with on insurances, liabilities and so forth.”

McCombs officially took the position as public safety director last month and is currently the only member of the newly formed public safety department.

On the list of priorities, the public safety director is looking to clean up the department’s inventory list and bring in money to the department by selling obsolete items.

After the dissolution of the Evans City-Seven Fields police department, the borough inherited items such as uniforms, technology and tactical equipment that the eventual Evans City police force will not able to use. Items such as computers, plate readers and software have become obsolete or require costly upgrades.

“The technology has changed so dramatically,” McCombs said in regards to the plate readers. “We paid $16,000 for them, but we could get a couple thousand dollars for them.”

Items such as uniforms and expired Kevlar cannot be sold, according to McCombs, who said he destroyed the equipment.

The department is looking to sell several computers, routers and two of the three remaining police vehicles.

A portion of the profit of the sold items would have to go back to Seven Fields, according to Deener-Kohan.

“A lot of this stuff was bought jointly (with Seven Fields),” Deener-Kohan said. “Now, with the dissolution, we have to separate it, sell it and then disperse it back to the appropriate people.”

Seven Fields, which has a larger population than Evans City, is entitled to just over 60% of the items after the dissolution of the joint commission.

“The population out there is tremendously bigger than what we’ve got here,” Deener-Kohan said. “So what we did was (divide resources up) by population and it was 38% of it went back to us, and 62% went to them.”