Stamford didn’t turn to E-Bay to sell used equipment, like Alaska famously did with the state jet, but it did opt to go online to dispose of a fleet of old dump trucks, garbage trucks and other heavy machinery.

The sale brought the city about $277,000, an amount that pleased Mayor Dannel Malloy, who said that formerly the city tended to get low bids or none at all when it tried to dispose of old equipment locally.

So for the used vehicle sale in July, the city hired Auction International Inc., which opened the action to a much wider pool of bidders.

Besides bringing in more money, Malloy said in a statement that the online auction enabled the city to clean areas where the vehicles had been stored, “some for a very long time.”