Gainesville, FL Saves Money By Reducing Take-home Vehicles

Gainesville, FL city officials say they've trimmed most of the fat out of their motor pools — an effort that has produced an estimated savings of $65,700 since 2008—by eliminating municipal-purposed vehicles that are also taken home by the employees — a practice that has drawn scrutiny nationwide as gas prices have risen and budgets have shrunk.

In the 2007-08 budget, the city reduced the number of take-home vehicles, and was able to save $31,025 for that year alone.

In 2008, according to city figures, there were about forty take-home vehicles being used by city employees — excluding Police Officers and Gainesville Regional Utilities employees — ranging from Fire Chief to Codes Enforcement Officer. Now there are five, all for Gainesville Fire Rescue officials who travel to scenes of emergencies.

Including Gainesville Police Department officers and GRU employees, four-hundred-twenty-three city workers had take-home vehicles in 2010 — Three-Hundred-Seventy-Four in the Police Department, Forty-Four in the Regional Utilities Department, and five in the Fire Rescue Department. In all, they drove 4,170,668 miles last year, an average of 9,859.7 miles per person — lower than the Department of Transportation's national average of 13,476.

Under the city's policy, employees are to use take-home vehicles only for driving to and from work, doing their "daily work in, or from, a vehicle," or on authorized travel. Transporting non-city employees, including family members, is off limits unless provided in a collective-bargaining agreement. And driving outside the city limits requires a supervisor's approval.

Gainesville is not alone in reviewing and reducing the use of take-home vehicles. In Providence, RI, in April 2011, the public safety commissioner there rescinded take-home vehicles for twenty-five employees — twenty-three police officers, a police lieutenant, and the animal control director — in an effort to save money. The Providence Journal reported that the lieutenant had been making a 166-mile round trip to his home in Windsor, CT, every workday in his city vehicle.

In the nation's capital, The Washington Post reported that the Council of the District of Columbia found its fleet — including two luxury Lincoln Navigators the council's chairman-elect had demanded last year — to be in violation of policies that bar sport utility vehicles for anything but emergency use, and set a fuel-economy standard for district automobiles.

The Alachua County Sheriff's Office has cut back on the number of take-home vehicles for non-sworn employees — from thirty-six in 2006 to twenty-seven now. The number of sworn deputies has increased from 270 in 2006 to 282, meaning the total take-home fleet has gone up by three vehicles in the last five years.

It's a different story for the county government. County Fleet Manager Ray Griffin said there are now nineteen take-home vehicles, down from forty-seven in 2008. The nineteen are used by Fire Rescue officials, building inspectors, road and bridge workers, and the county engineer, who are all on call around the clock.

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