Cherokee County Council played the part of Scrooge during a work session Wednesday when it refused to open up its wallet to pay for nearly $5 million in capital equipment needs.

After 90 minutes of, at times, prickly giveand take with county administrator Ben Clary and assistant administrator Holland Belue, council members voted to take bids on two triaxle dump trucks for the Roads and Bridges Department.

At the start of the work session, Belue presented council members with a single-page list of the county’s capital item needs for each department. Those items carried a hefty price tag of $4,917,000.

The list included four patrol cars for the sheriff’s department, pickup trucks for the Building Codes, Code Enforcement and 911 departments and a garbage truck and service truck for solid waste collections.

Roads and Bridges and Solid Waste Disposal departments had the most extensive lists. In addition to the two dump trucks, the Roads and Bridges Department capital needs are an excavator, side arm tractor, motor grader, backhoe, a skid steer loader and trailer, and used roadway widener.

A bulldozer, compactor, tandem dump truck, used fuel truck are some of the capital needs of the Solid Waste Disposal Department.

But councilman Charles Mathis described it as a “wish list” rather than a list of only the essential capital needs.

“I don’t think we can afford all this,” he said.

The county currently has $875,000 in a capital equipment fund that it collects from property taxes.

Councilman Quay Little questioned if the county needed to hire a full-time public works director to better assess the capital equipment list for the public works department.

Belue responded by saying he spent 90 percent of his time dealing with the public works department. He also added that some of his instructions, including a diagram for the highway grass cutting routes, were being ignored by the public works department.