By Lexi MooreLast summer the city of Hills purchased a street sweeper from Sanitation Products of Sioux Falls.The used Elgin Premier Pelican, which cost $12,780 should be paid off within two years and is saving the city money. In the past, Hills would pay the city of Luverne $140 to clean the streets.That bill would include the time spent in Hills and the time used while driving back and forth from Luverne. The streets were once cleaned twice a year, but rising costs forced the council to cut back to once a year. Owning the sweeper has been a nice convenience for Hills Maintenance Manager, Wayne Ward. "Now we can clean the streets whenever they get dirty," he said. ?"The rock and gravel the sweeper collects helps protect our streets."In early November residents of Steen may have seen the Hills sweeper in their area. The city of Steen arranged to have Wayne clean their streets. It took the sweeper 15 minutes to get from Hills to Steen and four hours to clean all of the streets. Offering this service to neighboring communities helps Hills pay for the sweeper and its upkeep.The city has hoped to make similar arrangements with the mosquito sprayer they purchased last spring. Ward said it’s necessary for smaller communities to rely on each other, because it’s not possible to stock all of the machinery a town needs to survive, so outsourcing to other towns becomes a viable option. Ward chooses to split the cleaning of Hills streets over a period of two days. Because the sweeper generates a fair amount of noise, he said he tries to sweep when the noise won’t bother residents.The sweeper has an industrial brush that sweeps debris off the street and onto a conveyer belt. The belt carries the debris into a hopper at the front of the vehicle where rocks and dirt collect until they can be emptied.