Trenton's Fleet

I have an idea.

Trenton’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade – I will repeat, TRENTON’S Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, not Hamilton’s –  will take place this coming Sunday, March 20, at 2PM, kicking off at St. Anthony’s Church, 626 South Olden Avenue. Opening ceremonies begin at 1:30.

Why don’t we ask every City Employee who has been provided a city-owned and Taxpayer-paid vehicle for their personal use appear in the Parade with their car? Let’s get some value out of those cars! We’ll see some accountability, as we shall finally be able to see just who has been given a vehicle. We can wave to all the public servants who have nice rides on the public dime, and take their names.  Good idea, huh?

That’s probably the only way we will be able to find out how many vehicles exist in the City’s fleet.  Although we did find out today that newly-installed Chief of Staff Paul Sigmund was assigned a vehicle by the Police Department – “This is probably the only time we could be doing this,” Acting Police Director Joe Juniak said. “Vehicles are very scarce in the department” – that’s one of the few occasions where we have received this kind of information.

It’s not supposed to be this hard to find out. As today’s Times article relates, we have had a city ordinance on the books for over a year that requires the City Business Administrator to publicly disclose, at least once a year, how many vehicles are in the City’s fleet, who is driving them, and why.

This ordinance was passed by City Council in January of 2010, after a citizen-organized petition campaign forced Council’s hand to do so. Had Council failed to pass the bill, it would have gone before the voters during the May Mayoral and Council election.  If you remember how many members of the previous Council ran for Mayor, you could probably understand that the last thing those candidates would want to defend on the campaign trail was freebies for employees like cars !

In any case, since the bill became law in late April 2010, this law has been conveniently ignored. There were no reports from the previous Administration, as former Business Administrator Dennis Gonzalez failed to submit a report as the law required him to do before June 30 of last year. Since then, the Spinal-Tap-drummer parade (that word, again!) of Business Administrators have not gotten around to it, either. So, on this 17th day of March 2011, nearly a year after this bill became law, we have no knowledge of how many vehicles are involved, and how much money this City is spending on personal rides for certain favored employees.

In the October Times article, Mr. Gonzalez estimated that there were 20 to 22 such vehicles involved, being driven by department directors and other employees on 24-hour call.  But we have no way of knowing the accuracy of that number, then or now.

We know from today’s article that Mr. Sigmund has one. I hear rumors of other department heads: the Director who has use of a vehicle to make his daily commute of two blocks to City Hall from his home; another who thinks it’s OK to have a City vehicle even though she is not on 24-hour call because she pays her own gas; another Director whose Municipal plates are spotted outside suburban grocery stores. But other than Mr. Sigmund, all of these are just rumors. It would be nice to know the facts, don’t you think? The Law entitles us to know the facts.

It must be nice for the Administration to pick and choose which laws to follow, and which may be ignored with impunity.

Why is this important? Well, as we are nearly nine months into our fiscal year, and still facing a whopper of a budget deficit – whatever the amount is today! – there are precious few places we can look to cut money without having to resort to additional waves of layoffs likely to affect all departments in the City including Public Safety. Discretionary vehicles should be one place we can look to save some money, with savings on Insurance, maintenance, gas, and the like.

What about those occasions when City Employees might legitimately get rousted out of bed and need to be somewhere at 3 in the morning? The ordinance allows employees to be reimbursed for use of personal vehicles. See? Easy.Besides, how many times a year might the Chief of Staff, or Business Administrator, or City Clerk, or City Attorney, need to be on site at 4 in the morning for a legitimate Emergency? Once? Twice? Let ’em submit an expense reimbursement form.

How much money is this costing us? Again, we don’t know. Let’s guess, shall we? OK, Mr. Gonzalez estimated 20 vehicles in 2009. The IRS estimates that the cost of operating a vehicle in 2011 to be 52 cents per mile. Let’s assume 15,000 miles per year.

That brings us to an annual figure in the range of $153,000 per year, and that’s probably low: Mr. Gonzalez could  likely have been low-balling the number of vehicles that he disclosed.

In any case. WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO MAKE GUESSES. WE ARE ENTITLED TO THE INFORMATION.

Let’s take the number as being in the range of $100,000 to $200,000. That’s close to the cost of two beat cops per year. If we have to take the step of police layoffs, will you find it acceptable that we may have to lay off two more police officers than we have to? Is that worth giving a car to a City Director to drive two blocks to City Hall?

I don’t think so.

Let’s try to make decisions about City-owned vehicles based on real information.

Let’s ask the Administration to observe the law, and give us a list: “For each vehicle listed, the name, office or position or employment or agency of each person who has been or is currently assigned or otherwise permitted to operate it shall be set forth, stating the date or date range of each person’s usage of that vehicle.” Sounds like the right thing to so.

Either that, or have them appear in the parade on Sunday.

Hmm, can we do both?