One day after Bend city councilors said they would sue the company that sold the city six problem-ridden buses, the city formally filed suit, claiming the company defrauded it of $256,000.

In August, the city bought the 1996 ElDorado Transmark buses from Transit Sales International, a bus brokerage firm based in Riverside, Calif. But ever since, the buses have been plagued with maintenance and repair issues that have cost the city about $120,000 to date.

”The taxpayers also need to know that they’ve been victimized, victimized by criminals and corrupt business people,” said City Councilor John Hummel in a press conference Friday afternoon.

”Transit Sales International ripped the taxpayers of Bend off and this city and this City Council is going to do everything in our power to make sure that the taxpayers of Bend are made whole.”

Bend asked for attorney’s fees and punitive damages in its suit filed in Deschutes County Circuit Court on Friday, City Attorney Jim Forbes said.

Transit Sales International did not return a message from The Bulletin on Friday seeking comment.

Bend purchased the six buses for $35,200 each. The buses had previously been used in Salt Lake City. An official with the Utah Transit Authority said continual maintenance problems had forced the authority to retire the buses early.

In 2005, the authority in Salt Lake City sold the buses to Transit Sales International for $1,800 or less each.

The 32-foot-long buses were intended to be the heart of the Bend’s new fixed-route bus system, Bend Area Transit, or BAT, which started Sept. 27.

Bend’s suit recaps many of the complaints voiced by city officials over the past few months. Its allegations include:

* The company told Bend that the Utah bus system retired the vehicles because they were unsuitable for longer bus routes, when the buses were actually being sold for scrap.

* Transit Sales International told the city it had paid more than $10,000 for each bus and had also made ”extensive repairs” on each bus, when neither was true.

* The mileage shown on the buses’ odometers and recorded in Utah was far higher than what Transit Sales International told the city, as reported by The Bulletin in December.

More than a month ago, the city’s police department launched an investigation into the discrepancy in the mileage of the buses.

That investigation by the Bend Police Department found that the mileage numbers shown on two of the buses’ odometers had been turned back at some point. One bus had about 60,000 more miles than shown on its odometer and the other bus was about 40,000 higher, the complaint said, although it does not accuse the company of actually turning back the odometers.

On Thursday, Bend police told The Bulletin the two buses’ odometers were off by 200,000 miles and 15,000 miles, respectively. Further investigation found that those numbers were incorrect, Capt. John Maniscalco said. The lawsuit lists the accurate mileage difference, he said.

The city was waiting for the police to verify the odometer readings before filing the suit, Hummel said.

”We could’ve filed a lawsuit based on the warranty violations, right out of the gate, but they said we think we can prove some odometer fraud,” Hummel said.

Under Oregon law, tampering with an odometer could bring the city three times the amount of its damage in a civil lawsuit, said Hummel, who is a defense attorney. Odometer tampering is also against federal law.

At the press conference on Friday, City Manager Andy Anderson said the city plans to adopt new purchasing rules that will help protect it from making similar mistakes in the future.

Those rules would require that the city research the ownership history of any used equipment and verify claims about the equipment’s quality and condition, he said.

”I’m not going to guarantee we never make another mistake,” Anderson said, ”but not in this area.”