Figure the pole is around 500 lbs - what $250?
I bet they’re contractors of a sort and would’ve sold it back to the city...
I’d doubt the city could or would buy such a thing used, dented up, probably with a cracked weld around the fat end. That looks like the horizontal boom that runs parallel to the roadway and hold 1-2-3 traffic light assy’s and is attached to the vertical post. You can see 1-2 of them in the pic still attached. It probably had a square mounting foot with four fat bolts going into a pad on the vertical and the weld to that square pad failed with torque/flex in the wind. So the fat end of that boom has an obvious cracked weld. Scrap. Very incriminating scrap!