AUBURN – When Herb Bunker learned that the city’s aggregate oil purchasing deal was faltering, he began looking to his neighbors.

“There’s a whole bunch of us that got together for the holidays in the past,” Bunker, of Amberly Way, said. “We have a nice little situation here, about 27 houses and a dead-end street. A tanker truck could come in and deliver a bunch of oil in one spot.”

He and his neighbors along Amberly Way and Briarcliff Knoll are drafting their own bid to send to local heating oil suppliers.

Bunker hopes the chance to become the sole supplier to nearly 30 high-end homes will lead to a heating oil discount.

“This may not work, but it sure as heck seems like it should save some fuel somewhere,” he said.

A municipal effort to use city buying power to bring relief to residents returned disappointing results last week. Laurie Smith, the interim city manager, said one oil dealer, C.N. Brown, submitted a bid to supply oil to Auburn’s residents. That bid was expensive, too – at $4.71 per gallon, about 30 cents more than today’s market.

The city program had drawn plenty of interest from residents. Smith said 597 residents registered with the city, saying they would willingly purchase 545,764 gallons. The City Council is expected to discuss the next steps at their June 2 meeting.

Smith said the number of customers might have been too much for oil suppliers, and said smaller cooperatives might get better prices.

That’s what Bunker and his Amberly Way neighbors are hoping.

“I signed up for the city program, so I was pretty disappointed when they only got one bid,” he said. “We sent out an e-mail to everybody on Saturday and sat down on Sunday and starting planning.”

He hopes to begin hearing back from oil suppliers by the end of the week.

“I guess I really don’t know where we’re going,” he said. “We’re just sticking our toes in the water and hoping it goes OK.”

Charlie Wilkins, general manager of oil dealer C.N. Brown, said his company is getting inquiries from people across the region about forming oil cooperatives.

“But nobody has yet,” he said. The cooperatives don’t necessarily save money because of other economic factors.

“People think that we’ll save money if we deliver to all the neighbors on the street at the same time, but that assumes everybody uses their oil at the same rate. But they don’t,” he said.

In some cases, the truck could deliver 100 gallons to one house and 40 gallons to a neighbor.

“And that’s just not economical for us,” he said. “In the end, we could end up going back several times to service all of those neighbors and we’d use even more gas.”

His company does let consumers lock in an oil price, if they’re willing to pay for their supply upfront. That’s the best way to guarantee a decent price.

“But it’s still speculating, and you lose if the price goes down,” Wilkins said. “If you locked in a price in 2007, you did great. If you locked in a price in 2006, you didn’t do so well.”