AUBURN – Councilors on Monday wanted to know why they couldn’t work a heating oil deal for 597 residents.

“Is it the number of customers?” Councilor Mike Farrell asked heating oil industry representatives Monday during an workshop meeting. “Is it the nearly 600,000 gallons of oil they were going to buy? I think the issue was that we were doing a co-op by itself.”

Councilors quizzed Maine Oil Dealers Association President Jamie Py and Tim Heutz, vice president of Lewiston’s Heutz Oil, about their business and how prices are set. Mayor John Jenkins promised another workshop meeting on the topic at a future council meeting.

At issue was the council’s effort to use city buying power to bring relief to residents.

Councilors decided to let residents join a city co-operative bid to purchase heating oil in bulk, hopefully driving the price down in the process. The plan drew plenty of interest, and 597 residents registered with the city, saying they would willingly purchase 545,764 gallons over the next year.

Oil dealers were cold to the plan, however. Only one out of 16 oil dealers submitted a bid, and it was a high bid – at $4.71 per gallon, about 30 cents more than the market price at the time.

Councilors on Monday were surprised that more dealers didn’t step forward, since a deal would have let them lock up 600 customers from Auburn easily.

“Oil co-ops are not new,” Farrell said. “They’ve been around for years, and what we tried to do was done in other states. So why was nobody interested?”

Heutz said that the details in the agreement made it a bad deal for dealers.

“We’re led to believe that bigger is always better,” Heutz said. “But that’s not always the way it works out.”

Heutz said there was no guarantee that individual customers would actually pay for the oil they ordered, hurting the dealer. And Heutz said that many small dealers don’t have the equipment to handle that big an order.

Smaller neighborhood co-ops make more sense, he said.

“They are more easily manageable and more attractive,” Heutz said.

Councilors did get credit for bringing the subject up. Mayor Jenkins said the council’s vote last month did force the issue and did have people talking across the state.

“I got phone calls from mayors saying they were going to do what Auburn does,” Jenkins said.

And Ed Desgrosseilliers, of 121 Hatch Road, told councilors not to give up on the idea yet.

“I think the proper move now is to ask the state Attorney General to investigate the oil companies for price fixing,” Desgrosseilliers said.