Call it another example of the law of unintended consequences not to mention government waste.

What happens when you set a minimum mileage amount for bureaucrats to keep their beloved cars?

Answer: they’ll figure out a way to run up the odometers.

Why is this even a surprise?

Here’s the back story:

A [Fairfax] County auditor first noticed in 2004 that a large number of official vehicles were parked for long stretches in a garage at county headquarters. The county maintained 3,500 sedans, trucks and heavy-equipment vehicles, or about one vehicle for every three employees.

Today, the average sedan costs taxpayers about $20,000 and lasts about six years. Add in $1,200 in annual maintenance. And gas: 9 million gallons a year for trips countywide.

So the County Board of Supervisors conducted an audit and in a bid to save millions of dollars implemented a strategy to reduce the number of county operated vehicles off of the road. First they asked managers to turn in low-mileage vehicles but few came in as the bureaucrats were loathe to part with vehicles in their areas. Next the Supervisors implemented a policy that eliminated cars that weren’t being used at least 4,500 miles a year. What they didn’t factor in was the elaborate strategies that government bureaucrats would employ to keep their taxpayer-provided autos. Far from the hundreds of cars they were hoping to get off the road, the new policy only netted 11 vehicles.

From the Washing Post coverage:

Knowing they could lose their cars if they don’t use them, Fairfax county employees are driving hundreds of vehicles across the county — or are swapping cars with those who drive more — simply to run up the odometers.

Lt. George Robbins got the urgent e-mail in late July. The office that keeps track of cars for the Fairfax County Fire Department wanted to know why the mileage was low on an investigator’s GMC Safari van. Couldn’t the guy drive it more?

Their efforts — heightened even as gasoline prices soared this year — are documented in hundreds of e-mails and memos obtained by The Washington Post under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

“I understand the difficulty in getting miles when you live so close,” reads the Aug. 1 e-mail that vehicle coordinator Ben Coffman sent to Robbins. “There are only so many places you can drive to on a given day! We need to get around 500 miles a month to keep above the minimum . . . a few missed days of driving (going to a class, leave, etc.) could drop your mileage below the minimum.”

Tricia Rodgers, a therapist for the homeless, got her warning Feb. 15 from her supervisor on the Community Services Board.

“We need to think about scheduling with Tricia to use her vehicle for everything we can think of, so she won’t lose it,” James Van Cooper, director of residential mental-health services, wrote in an e-mail to Rodgers.

Officials in several departments successfully appealed low mileage readings, saying that their vehicles’ odometers were wrong.

James D. Gorby, the county’s director of vehicle services, acknowledged in an interview that the effort to weed the fleet has become a “very sensitive issue” in county government. Auditor John Adair, who first suggested that the fleet was bloated, said: “People in the county [government] would rather you take their child than you take their vehicle from them.”

So at a time of record gas prices and nearly bankrupt county governments, we have bureaucrats figuring out ways to drive more miles. That’s just great.

h/t: Marginal Revolution

tags: bureaucrats government waste

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 10:08 pm by Insider and is filed under Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.