Travis County Commssioners Court
September 2, 2003
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Item 29
29. Consider and take appropriate action on recommendations for reduction of the Travis County fleet by the fleet management committee.
>> good afternoon, this is joe gieselman, transportation and natural resources and my fellow committee member mike joyce.
>> welcome to both of you.
>> I know this item has been postponed several times and I hope that you are -- that we are not too late to save some additional money for fy '04 and that is our primary objective here. Is to reduce the cost of the fleet. We have a presentation and al if you could bring that up. Here we go. Already. There are two way that's we can reduce our cost of fleet. One is reducing the number of vehicle miles traveled. The second is by reducing the absolute size of the fleet. That speaks to capital lay operating costs and we will address both of these means in our presentation today. First let's get some definitions out of the way. When we talk about vehicles, we are talking about sedans, pickups, s.u.v.'s and vans and motorcycles. Because quite frankly, our fleet is made up of a lot of different stuff. We have vehicles, we have heavy equipment, that would be like the tow trucks which are also trucks, and -- that makes you normally think of road equipment. But in there there is also buses, used by the sheriff's department, we would classify that as heavy equipment. And then finally, there's all of the other miscellaneous equipment, trailers, mowers, whatnot. Then I don't think that the court is as focused on when it talks about fleet as you are on the heavy equipment and the vehicles. Now, our -- our recommendations today deal primarily with vehicles and heavy equipment. We are going to make some fairly strong recommendations in both areas. And I say strong because I think that we've -- we've talked around this issue for years. And I think perhaps this year the court is looking for some substantial cuts, highlighting perhaps earlier years or there may have been some savings but not really major savings. What I'm recommending today are substantial savings. The first one we want to tackle is the vehicle miles of travel. We do this through three means. One, reduce take home vehicles. Two, reduce the total number of trips being made for business purposes. And number 3, somewhat affects the other, is constrain the budget artificially. Make a decision up front. Just as you did on the cell phones. That you are going to [indiscernible] so much money for fuel, that's it. And everybody lives within that allocation. First let's tackle the take-home vehicles. There are 280 take-home vehicles. That represents 40% of all vehicles. 40% of all vehicles are being taken home. The average home-to-work trip is 40 miles. We have taken this from records, these are not guestimates, these are actual records averaged across every take-home vehicle in the county irregardless of department.
>> joe, now that's one way.
>> that's two-way.
>> round trip.
>> round trip. 40 miles round trip.
>> okay. Home to work to home.
>> home to work to home round trip.
>> okay.
>> 40% of the take home vehicles are going outside the county. So when you look at all of that, you look at the distance it made, you look at the number of vehicles taking that trip, you are talking about 2.3 million miles traveled -- of travel being done merely for the journey to work, journey to home. That is not a business purpose. And the arguments that it divides coverage are I am -- our implicit coverage, but is it a main stream business purpose? Now when you are looking at cutting fleet, what are the priorities? We are not after the business trips, we are after the -- the journey to home, which I contend is primarily a personal trip not a business trip. When you talk about reducing that, if you just take a cost saved by the amount of fuel and maintenance, from that number of vehicle travel, you are talking about $365,000 right off the top. You can cut t.n.r.'s budget by $365,000. By eliminating take-home vehicles. On the flip side of that, if you don't want to eliminate take-home vehicles, but if you contend that it's a personal use, you can charge the employees for the benefit of having a county vehicle if you charge the i.r.s. Rate of .36 cents a mile, that would represent $821,000 of revenue to the county for that use. So we are not talking about a small amount of money in either case. Now, associated with that is the journey for the off duty use of the county vehicle. Right now, there is a charge made for the use of the county vehicle. I contend that when the deputy uses the county vehicle, for extra duty, there is no charge being made for his trip from the home to the site and back home again if it's a take home vehicle.
>> can we be precise with language here. When you talk about off duty are you talking about being called into duty for Travis County or are these the unrelated jobs, maybe be hired for construction site or some people doing off duty security.
>> the latter.
>> I'm making sure that we are precise.
>> the latter. I would say this is -- this is not related to -- to off hours, county business, but it's the extra amount picked up by the duty on his free time. Now, there is a charge being made right now per hour for that vehicle usage. It's -- it's not covering the journey to home. That ought to be taken care of.
>> one other quick question there, joe, in terms of that charge per hour, which division gets that --
>> the general fund.
>> okay. But it doesn't specifically go back to fleet, just into the general fund pot?
>> that's correct.
>> now, let get at further reduction vehicles -- because there is perhaps an abundance of vehicles at the county, there's really no [indiscernible] to use vehicles for whatever purpose at any time. So unlike -- and this is not untrue of your personal vehicle. Once you purchase the car, you purchase insurance, then it costs you less per trip made because you've got all of that stuff cost. The same is true with the county. Once you buy a vehicle, whatever it costs, 25,000 or 30,000, plus you buy the insurance, we are self-insured, there's really no [indiscernible] constraints to using that as frequently as you can. There's no constraint to that use. So there's somewhat of an encouragement to use the vehicle. Whether or not it's economical or not, somehow we have to get to that, by encouraging the people to train their trips. If you are going out for a trip or two trips purposes for the same purpose or three or four, don't do single purpose trips. Right now, no one thinks about it. If I have to go run an errand, you go run an errand. Five minutes later if you have to go out and do another trip, so what? That's a county vehicle. That's kind of discretionary trip making that we have to start constraining in some form or fashion. If you do that -- you do that in part by constraining the availability of those vehicles. I would suggest that one way you do that is in the area of management, administrative position, professional usage and occasional users of county vehicles. Many of those vehicles are there on a stand by basis and vehicles in the garbage are red for a discretionary trip. It's there. [indiscernible] those vehicles or a portion of those can be put in a pool, in two departments. A vehicle pool in t.n.r. And a vehicle pool in the sheriff department. It would first reduce in absolute terms the number of vehicles aloe indicated to t.n.r. In the sheriff's department. You subsequently ask those two departments to put the remaining vehicles for those administrative professional and [indiscernible] divisions to pool their vehicles and to have them available for those positions on a -- a first come, first served basis. Each of those departments would manage their own pool of fleet. So there's no additional overcost or -- cost or overhead by the county at large to manage the pool. I would recommend that in only two departments because I think that's where the greatest need is or the greatest potential for pool usage without getting into the smaller departments that have one or two vehicles, trying to run a county-wide pool system is not feasible. Because of the cost, government, people are just too many places to make those pool vehicles available would be a logistical nightmare trying to satisfy everybody's demand on demand. So we do not touch the other third of the fleet that may have vehicles for this pool purpose because I think the same objective can be met by dealing with [indiscernible] department and within -- with the sheriff's department and within t.n.r. If we did that, we believe there can be about a $365,000 capital savings in fleet and about a $50,000 savings in annual o and m costs. You could also couple that with budgeting for mileage budgets within each of these departments, t.n.r. And also the sheriff's department. So that if an individual agrees to use their private vehicle for county business, the county would reimburse them for that. I'm not saying that all county employees are even -- or even most county employees would volunteer to do that. Because there is an insurance cost. Quite frankly, by using that personal vehicle for county business, their insurance rates goes up. And they just may not want to do that. But the other amount amount active is, if you are using this -- the other alternative is if you are using this vehicle for county business, use a pool vehicle. If you can't use a pool vehicle use your own car and we will reimburse you for it at the i.r.s. Rate of 36-cent per mile. The other thing we hear quite frequently is that I need a vehicle in case I'm called out. It's a latent demand as opposed to a real demand. Because of the nature of our business, public service, we are expected to respond as quickly as responsible. Some of us actually have service levels [indiscernible] within an hour, be to the site within an hour, respond immediately. Those are built into our performance standards. In order to do that, you have to have the means to respond. That is quite often used as a justification to have a personal vehicle. We believe the county as a business can have its cake and eat it, too. But streamlining the on call functions. That you can have designated home call supervisors and for those supervisors they would be assigned a county vehicle when they were on call. That means instead of having all of the supervisors on call, having everyone available just in case, you would designate on a weekly basis one among them to be on call for that week. The others would not be required to respond unless you have in a catastrophic event and in that case you would be tiered out at a level of protocol. The first on call, if the situation called for subsequent on call, you would tier out until you had the [indiscernible] managers at one time. We also believe that many of the oncall events can be anticipated such things as hurricanes, winter weather advisories, flood warnings, even homeland security alerts. Can be predicted with some degree of certainty. When you have those situations you allow as many people as need to have vehicles take those vehicles home. In anticipation of the events, but -- but we predict that those situations will no be 365 days a year, and probably less than 30 days a year in -- [indiscernible] the -- the -- actively managed. I mentioned trip chaining. I also believe there may be potential for an organized shuttle service between certain centers within our campuses. As we organize our east west service center, our east west command service or south campus or a new county campus, a downtown campus, there may need to be enough trips between those campuses and subcampuses to begin a shumghts service between campuses. Shuttle service between campuses. Thus allowing those trip purposes to be made by a county service as opposed to individual county vehicles. Consolidating mail runners is another example. Instead of having multiple mail runners, perhaps we need to look at an opportunity to consolidate all into one or several. T.n.r. Has talked about having our crews delivered to the work site in buses in crew cabs instead of smaller vehicles. Another alternative is to have our work crews show up at the site to work, where and you have concentration of -- of work trips for an extended length of time at a reconstruction project or a drainage project, have the employee show up for work at the work site instead of at the satellite yard and then be shuttled to the work site in the county vehicle. Lately, we believe that you can artificially constrain the fuel budget by 5%. And un-- not necessarily decide right now how trips are affected by that. Much like cell phone usage, to say, look, your budgets are cut by 5%. You manage the remnant of that budget. 95% of what you used to have. I would also suggest that we decentralize the fuel budget so that each -- each department is managing their own fuel budget by a few allocations on a month-to-month basis. Let those managers decide what trips can be made and not made within a constrained fuel budget. I believe this can be done and without sacrificing our business purposes and without a lot of sacrifice on -- it will require some conscience management of how people travel and travel in county vehicles.
>> joe, how much is the county's annual fuel budget now?
>> the 5% savings would represent about $160,000. A year.
>> so 160,000 is 5%?
>> it's 5%.
>>
>> [indiscernible]
>> I would guess that that makes a lot, 1.2 million -- no?
>> 160, 3.2 million.
>> 3.2 million. Approximately.
>> it's 160 times two times 10.
>> 1670 times --
>> because it's five percent, if you want 10% --
>> [multiple voices]
>> not all of that is general fund. It's split between road and bridge and general fund.
>> I think that was what jessica was [multiple voices]
>> about how much is general fund? Roughly, if we know.
>> 60%?
>> 725, I believe. Somewhere in that neighborhood.
>> okay. So most of it is road and bridge.
>> all right. I also -- in the process of looking at this, we -- we were looking very seriously across the board and I know that -- that the issue of law enforcement and patrol is a particularly sensitive one. We define patrol as being a fully wired and equipped county vehicle with overhead lights, cage, siren and radio for a uniformed patrol officer whose primary functions are performed from the vehicle. I think that it's important to separate law enforcement from patrol. Because i've heard the discussion at the court and I hear the terms being used interchangeably. I think a patrol is the people on the street on a day-to-day basis whose vehicle is much like a tool, they have to have it, they could not execute. It's an essential part of their job. I separate that from law enforcement. We need vehicles without a doubt, but they don't need it on a continuous basis. So I separate law enforcement on a continuous basis and law enforces on a continual basis, meaning they need a vehicle and they need it periodically throughout the day.
>> joe, where do you classify the constable vehicles that are used for civil processing. Is that that's a good question, that's a good question. We struggled with that one as we did through the park. I would lien probably toward patrol on those usages as opposed to law enforcement. Quite frankly, this is going to have to be a judgment call. I look at park patrol as a -- as essentially can they do their job. Continuously without the vehicle. I do the same thing without constables. I would say it would be difficult for them to perform as defined in their job description without a vehicle.
>> I guess the only subcategory could be radar and lights because there are some of our constables who absolutely do their work with the county vehicle but that does not have the patrol package which includes radar. So there may need to be some subsections here.
>> I'm open to that. I think that I'm more trying to get to the essential duty of the job. This -- this -- I'm taking you to these places in part because these are the shadows of fleet management. If you want to get out more efficient use of fleet, you have to go to these areas. However painful that might be. Now, on patrol -- all patrol vehicles themselves, on patrol vehicles themselves, you have various models. We think you can save money by going to a 24/7 model for fleet usage. Which means you rotate those vehicles on patrol, they run 24 hours a day. Much like the Austin police department. Vehicle comes out, it goes right back out again. There's a certain percentage of the patrol that's set aside for maintenance. So that you want to make sure that fleet is available at all times. It does mean that you wear those vehicles out much sooner than otherwise. But 100% of the vehicle is being used for county purposes. It is the most efficient use of the resource. There's no down time, there's no parking lot time, and there's literally -- it's literally used 24 hours a day in county business.
>> in terms of just so we are understanding the words that are being used, is the thought that represented to a vehicle being down for maintenance, getting an oil change, et cetera. Would there have to be time taken out of that officer's day to go deliver the vehicle or does it just stay where it is, they pick up another vehicle and move on and do their day? How do we not run into that problem of folks spending their valuable time shuttling vehicles to get the maintenance they need. Because otherwise there's an offset cost here.
>> I think there's a shift in culture for t.n.r. Fleet maintenance that [indiscernible] for the sheriff's deposit in this regard. I mean this would be an absolutely different business for t.n.r. To be able to provide that level of service again for us as a 24/7 operation. We have to deal be able to guarantee that those patrol vehicles are on the streets without hesitation. I would submit that we would have to get in the mode of being able to provide those vehicles on demand. Without the sheriff patrol having to take out their time to go hunt for a vehicle. It will require some -- some rethinking on our part.
>> I'm just thinking on west command and the west service center, those things are relatively close together. So in terms of if you had to send somebody over from the service center to go shuttle vehicles back and forth, that's -- that's quite a different story than on the east side where the t.n.r. Road and bridge offices are nowhere near east command.
>> well, we are going there.
>> I'm getting you.
>> and this may be --
>> this may be an evolutionary process. But t.n.r. Is also moving to an east-west orientation on fleet maintenance. So the -- so the responsiveness make take us some time to get there so that we can have the vehicles to the east-west command center upon demand. And this may be a thing that we do over several years. But if you are trying to get an efficient use of fleet, this is something that you may want to look at.
>> do we own the property where the fleet maintenance facility is located?
>> we do if we go toward the turkey farm, which we own.
>> do we own the current site?
>> we own all of the current sites. We lease the lcra site at the dam. I think it's a 20-year lease.
>> and it's five minutes, I mean west command, west service are five minutes apart.
>> all right. I don't mean to be picking on the sheriff's department, we have also looked at t.n.r. And some level of debt there. We believe that there can be some absolutely cuts in heavy equipment. I mean, reductions. We can get by with one piece of equipment instead of two. We can absolutely defer the purchase of the additional equipment. This comes in an area where we were fixing to shift resources to storm water management. Because we realized that we have some surplus heavy equipment. But rather than sell it, and we were advocating to the court that we move into the business of storm water management, which will require some additional heavy equipment. But today we really don't have clear guidance from the court on where we are going with that. With certainly don't have the manpower budget or the fees to implement that program. So we would suggest that we absolutely reduce our fleet. When the day comes that we move in to storm water management. We would recommend that we lease our equipment first. To find out what we really need and then on that basis if we have a -- a 100% use for that equipment, we would recommend to the county that we ultimately purchase it, but that [indiscernible] in the storm water management program, so to speak, before we advocate absolutely buying heavy equipment for that purpose.
>> joe, I remember us getting into some kind of deals where we were buying a lot of heavy equipment, but we had certain kind of sell-back provisions am I remembering this correctly, that really made a lot of sense. Is this in lieu of that? Or is this that in addition to -- would we still keep that strategy? Basically we were getting back 90% of what we spent to begin with because the used equipment market is so strong.
>> [indiscernible] we haven't given up that --
>> that's still in step.
>> we do that quite frankly the heavy equipment we currently use for road and bridge.
>> okay.
>> in this case, we are saying there being an absolute reduction in fleet in heavy equipment, when we go back, if we do, we can do lease purchase.
>> okay. Finally, one more point in that. Is that the underutilized vehicles. We have some 33 vehicles that are designated as underutilized. Basically they are not being used more than 8,000 miles a year. We suggest we basically integrate those underutilized vehicles into the fleet and buy --ably [indiscernible] in their place, then we take 33 vehicles that have high mileage on them and sell them. So that -- so that there would be an absolute reduction of 33 vehicles in the fleet. What I'm saying is that we are not necessarily going to sell the underutilized vehicles. Because they may be some of our newer vehicles. There's no reason to sell them. But instead of buying a new vehicle, for one that's up for replacement, they substitute them in with the underutilized and then sell off the high mileage vehicle. What I am saying, though, is that there will an absolute reduction in the number of vehicles in our fleet by 33 vehicles. For those individuals currently using underutilized vehicles we have the pool system to take care of them or we have mileage to to reimburse them in the use of personal vehicles.
>> the savings that I see indicated here is over what period of time?
>>
>> on page 15 --
>> I think it's the last pages.
>> [indiscernible] in capital, and $92,000 in o and m.
>> okay.
>> immediately or during our lifetime.
>> it would be the selloff could occur within this fiscal year, '04. 7.
>> the new fiscal year.
>> hopefully in your lifetime. [laughter]
>> all right. Finally, right sizing the fleet. By this I mean, instead of buying an s.u.v., Our standard size vehicle we can buy a smaller sized sedan. Or certainly a more fuel efficient vehicle. They manufacture vehicles now, sedans, that easily get 30 miles to the gallon. Why buy a vehicle that gets half that fuel efficiency? A 16-mile a gallon versus a 32-mile per gallon. Not much different in the capital cost, but the fuel cost is half. There's no -- no reason not to do that. But we do have to pick those uses for which this is viable. Some vehicles can't do it. They are too -- too heavy used. If they are use odd a day-to-day basis -- used on a day to bay basis and if they are used for certain type of uses, off road, for instance, it may not be feasible to buy a smaller size or more fuel efficient vehicle. But I contend that for about a third of our fleet we should be looking at different types of vehicles instead of the ones that we are currently purchasing.
>> joe, would you also be looking at the appropriate use of that vehicle? Because certainly we heard from -- from the fire marshal and we have certainly heard that from our e.m.s. Medical director because of the physical, the size of the stuff that they are required to carry, we would obviously be looking at right sizing the truck space as well, correct?
>> understand.
>> sounds like [indiscernible] using it as a tool.
>> we have already run into that with the fire marshal, they have a lot of stuff that they have to haul around.
>> it's a tool rather than --
>> but that is -- that is another shadowy side of fleet maintenance because you have to be real careful in how you define that. The greater sized vehicle quite often is justified based upon the amount of equipment that comes standard with the vehicle. How many [indiscernible] vehicles does the county need.
>> how many which? Canine.
>> I will be accused of picking on the constables begin if I ask that question, joe. I'm glad you raised it.
>> I can tell you that we have no canine vehicles less than three years ago.
>> how many do we have now?
>> quite a few.
>> do we have an articulated number of canine vehicles?
>> I believe we have around four or five tilt. S time.
>> do we know how many are assigned to the sheriff's office at this time?
>> the canine vehicles, five.
>> so has five, we know the fire marshal has one. We suspect there are some other cars -- [multiple voices]
>> we are not picking on -- we love animals down here, we are trying to do the right thing vehicle-wise.
>> let me use my own example. I'm not picking on the dog carriers. Quite frankly I hear the same justification from my own road and bridge managers. In my park supervisors. They have to have an s.u.v. Because they go off road or because they have to have all of the equipment that goes with road and bridge operations. I can tell you that it's not all that often that a park vehicle goes off road. And quite frankly probably not that often that even a fleet maintenance -- or a road and bridge managings off road -- manager goes off road. So you just have to be very careful about how vehicles are specified. By the people who use those vehicles. Because of self fulfilling prophesy. I have to have this much more expensive vehicle, this vehicle, because of all of the equipment that I have to have. Sure enough by the end of the day, it's the s.u.v. They thought they had to have. And you really have to be a -- hard nosed when it comes to vehicle specification. Or you are not going to get there.
>> in case people think we haven't been hard nosed with you, we yanked your county vehicle what, two or three years ago? That would be a yes. All right. I have probably stepped on so many toes at this point. But -- but I took you there because I think that you have to go there. We have talked about right sizing, fleet management, [indiscernible], quite frankly I'm tired of hearing about it. There's some serious ways of getting to the issue. If you want a second opinion on this, there's a way of doing that as well. There are people in the business of coming in to evaluate your fleet. There are consultants that do this. There are other fleet managers that will probably gladly become a part of a blue ribbon committee that will come into the county and look at our fleet operations. Part of the problem with the fleet, the t.n.r., And the fact that we have a -- we have a vehicle users committee is that we all have vested interests. And we -- we have been protecting those interests for several years. If you want to get serious and you don't believe that we can do the job, then there are others outside that can. And there's a way of tapping into those experts outside of Travis County. They will cost you some money. We looked into that. We can either buy their software or we can buy their consulting expertise depending on the level of service that you want. We believe for a $50,000 budget you can buy a top to bottom evaluation of your county fleet that will come back to you aside from t.n.r., Aside from the vehicle users committee, that will make recommendations to you for implementation in fy '05. Options available. In summary, if you want to tackle the cost of fleet in Travis County, you have to look at vehicle [indiscernible] of travel, fleet size, if you took all of the issues that we have put here today, the savings are not trivial. They can range between 4 and $5 million in capital costs and annual over a million dollars. But they are serious recommendations. They will change our business operations. They will tackle vested interest and they will step on a lot of toes. Including my own and my own operation. End of presentation.
>> will they reduce efficiency or promote efficiency or what?
>> I think they can do both.
>> so you think we can carry out our mission, meet our duties and responsibilities and still make these changes.
>> let me speak for t.n.r. The answer is unqualified yes we can.
>> this is not the time to stop speaking for the other departments, joe.
>> but some -- in terms of being the first out there and setting the example of saying we did not, democracy did not end as we know it when we implemented these changes, makes it easier for everybody else to get with the program.
>> I want to make sure that it's clear, too. Fleet management is not just by responsibility. I do have fleet management, I have fleet operations. But the two largest users of fleet is t.n.r. And the sheriff department. We both have to manage our fleets, otherwise you won't get to the objective that you are looking for. On the last page when you show and list the pool numbers and mileage numbers, should I look at these as a range or are they added together.
>> I think this is a big picture, all things considered. I think this is just the order of magnitude. I think that it's there that is a possibility. And do I think that you are going to save this much money, no, I don't. I think there are ways of getting chunks of this, some of it -- if some of it is done in fy '04, some of it would take a longer period of time. Only because it will take a reorientation of the way we manage our fleet, the way we maintain our fleet. It would certainly be a change in business from the status quo.
>> uh-huh.
>> some of the questions that came up during your presentation, again, I apologize, we would have asked these we had gotten these earlier. If we allow elected officials to manage their mileage, their gasoline allocations, what is to stop an independent elected official, other than I guess by budget rule, christian, of being able to move moneys from other line items to supplement and basically getting around the court.
>> no different than any other budget function.
>> okay.
>> except for this is done on a month-to-month basis.
>> okay. But we could do a budget rule that basically would say christian is nodding his head that any kind of transfers into that would have to come through the Commissioners court.
>> quite frankly, if you want to do this on a quarterly basis. We have through the fuel system the means of managing a fuel budget by department. We can even forecast that given the current fuel usage, whether or not a department is going to run out of fuel allocation by the end of the quarter. To come in and do a budget amendment. This doesn't even have to be an administrative nightmare. It can be done by p -- by t.n.r. Or by budget depending on where you want to invest the budget authority. But it is a -- 80's budget constraint -- it's a budget tron constraint. It's a budget control. But quite frankly I would expect the departments to be able to magazine this without -- manage this without doing very many budget constraints. We could also forecast the seasonal variations in fuel usage even at this point to make sure that the monthly allocations are relative to past fuel consumption.
>>
>> [one moment please for change in captioners]
>>
>> and my thought here is the village of the hills and any other entities that we've got where they have specifically contracted with us to pay for a certain style of vehicle, you know, with radar or whatever.
>> I do not have that; however, I know that we can pull that out of the sheriff's department or constable two are a couple of locations. I know they're out there, but I don't know which exact vehicle it may be.
>> which need to be sensitive if in terms of if somebody says we need a radar unit, it's not for us to say well, we disagree. Also, and I told mike about this before the lunch, so he's not surprised, I am already hearing related to the sheriff's office in terms of we made a very conscious effort of pulling a lot of vehicles from assigned things. And I am hearing of pool vehicles being assigned on a nightly basis to the exact same people so that anyone else looking at it from the outside would go, they have a take-home vehicle when we specifically took certain take-home vehicles away from certain functions. How do we deal with that?
>> Commissioner, I don't know exactly what you're referring to --
>> we took some vehicles away from courthouse security. If you could check into that, please.
>> I'm not aware of --
>> of people getting assigned who had take-home vehicles, got taken away, and are now being given a pool vehicle on a nightly basis to the same person.
>> not that I'm aware of.
>> that would be contrary to our instructions. Just me.
>> all right. I think it's a very good reported and I really don't know why we would want to go outside and pay somebody from the outside for information that we basically can get together ourselves. And so -- but I think I'm certainly willing to take some of the -- practically the -- all of the whole report as it is and try to implement as much of it as possible.
>> does the committee have a specific recommendation about what actions we ought to take now in preparation for the '04 budget? I know it would take a lot more time and we would have to spend the better part of a year getting ready for the '05 budget. Any low hanging fruit here?
>> how courageous do you feel here?
>> any low hanging fruit in tnr?
>> sure. I'll have a recommendation. Quite frankly, the hottest topic, but the first one I would deal with is take-home vehicles. I say this because to go elsewhere starts dealing with business purpose and then it gets into the day-to-day use of the fleet or what you expect the county government to do. The take-home purpose I think until we start dealing with that, everyone is going to look at why should I gut this if this type of use is being made of the fleet not for county business?
>> are you suggesting take-home vehicles as in the next three weeks?
>> no.
>> thank you. Because I can just hear it right now in terms of televisions around the county getting louder and louder of what do they mean by that? So you would be talking about I tackle it with the intent that any recommendations come in '05?
>> no, I would say by January 1 I would say that to allow a household to adjust their household budget to accommodate not having the county vehicle available probably takes at least a quarter to do that.
>> could we also run that by the county attorney's office because I'm remembering some things that related to the terms and conditions of some of our employees, they have to be set with the beginning of the budget because then when we change it, I just remember something coming up and it had to do with the sheriff's office. If you could -- it's basically they agreed to the pop scale that we set, then they were basically agreeing to the terms and conditions. But we can run that by pop clark or whomever is our personnel person.
>> the other thing I think you could do immediately before you adopt the budget is a five percent reduction in the fuel budget. And allocate fuel by department. Fuel budget by department.
>> how much of the fuel budget will we spend this year?
>> let me get that number by road and bridge and by general fund because I think that's probably what you want to see.
>> okay.
>> and are we locked into a price right now on gasoline? Because I certainly have seen an incredible fluctuation at the pumps for our personal vehicles. What are we guaranteed? Because it's getting up to numbers here.
>> it is.
>> it's crazy.
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> when we purchase one of those must tanks, do they have fuel in mind or just a smaller vehicle?
>> are you talking about the d.p.s.?
>> yeah.
>> those are all v-8, aren't they?
>> they're high performance v-8 and don't have better fuel economy than anything else.
>> we understand that they're phasing those out.
>> they look good, though. [ laughter ]
>> I really would -- those are the type of heavy duty industrial uses that I think you need to be careful about. In a time of right sizing, I think it occurs more in a mainly administrative area and management area where its proven usage is more like your home vehicle than it is the type that the patrol is going to make. Another immediate recommendation would be to sell off the underutilized vehicles. I think that's part of the --
>> I didn't quite understand your point.
>> I don't know what vehicles -- I mean, we have -- [inaudible - no mic]. I have two vehicles that are in the field most all day. That would definitely have an impact on our operation. Because we don't use them very much. It's under 8,000 miles, but they use them everyday. We've already done some of the efficiencies that joe's talked about. They plan where they're going and they don't go from one side of the county to the other side of the county. They go to one part of the county for that day and a different part of the county for the next day. Those kind of questions that joe mentioned theed to get looked at. That's two in my office that we wouldn't have.
>> so it may have an impact within the sheriff's office because we do have a vehicle not on the underutilized list, but historically show up there, that are just driven around the del valle complex. That's not to say that those vehicles aren't needed, but they just don't accumulate a whole lot of mileage when they have a small area they're being driven in.
>> I was going to talk about personnel carriers.
>> yes, sir. I think our plan is to try to transition to some more of those types of vehicles for that purpose out at del valle, instead of buying full size pickups and stuff, just get other type of utility vehicles that are more conducive to the campus.
>> or the electric stuff might be conducive to that because it's a very short trip.
>> I think she's talking about some of the smaller departments that may not be conducive to pool usage. I would say, though, that vehicle mileage -- [ inaudible ] -- for their own vehicle may be another alternative where you have home usage. There's no doubt about it, but is there a demand of county-owned vehicle to satisfy that need?
>> one thing we need to be careful, joe, and this would need to be explored, is I know that when folks get their personal insurance, it's basically for use as a personal vehicle. And as part of the annual thing that I have to check off with my insurance company is is this vehicle primarily used for business? Occasional use they don't care, but a regular use. And you would be basically saying you must on a regular basis use your personal vehicle, then that can create huge issues for somebody on their personal car insurance. And I don't hear you saying that you would be paying for that differential of somebody being forced to change their personal vehicle use to one that would require a different type of insurance.
>> what it would do is it would cawdz you to use your vehicle more efficiently. And that's what it would do. You would not allow that to get into the personal use versus business use. And that's what we're looking for. This is a little bit like the cell phones. You want to get people on for this thing, you give them mileage. You can't do that with law enforcement. Out of the 200 take-home vehicles, joe, how many of those are sheriff and constables? 95% of them?
>> I would say so.
>> then I think that that number is one that's really hard to tie into. I mean, if you're trying to look for savings, I think that the -- and I applaud you for -- boy, you got creative. That was what you were trying to do. And, I mean, tough decisions are -- they necessitate creativity and you've done it. But it seems like for law enforcement on 24/7, I think that that would be disastrous to us. I think that it would -- first of all, it would cost us so much money. You would run those things in the ground. And to purchase those vehicles is -- I think if you were to really run a matrix of that thing, I mean, I don't know. Maybe they did that. But that would be interesting to know. You would probably wear a car out in a year if you put a car in 24/7. Especially the western part of this community. I mean, it is -- that is a real issue. But I could see where you would throw it in the mix. Let's take a look at everything. You really have between the sheriffs, the constables and what I really consider to be the kind of vehicles that you're talking about out of tnr is half of our fleet because sheriffs is 417 and the constables is another 100. So you've got 500 there. And if you take out all of your big, heavy equipment kind of vehicles, I mean, you know, you're probably somewhere in the 150 to 160 range. So half of our vehicles are -- can't really -- half of your vehicles you can't do anything about. But if you were to -- there are 23 departments here that have automobiles. Unfortunately, if you take out the sheriff's and you take out yours, you know, it may only equate to 100 to 150 vehicles. But that's a big step, I mean, 100 to 150 vehicles, if you were to really say we're going to turn these in too, you say you use your car and we pay you mileage. I think that if you pay mileage -- people get real sane about whether or not they want to jump in the car and run down for a trip if they know it's their car. I mean, what we've done is we have allowed the luxury of people just having -- I mean, just on the dole of the county. And I think if you -- I agree. I think that you've got to make some pretty tough decisions. I don't know -- the district attorney has 13. Are some of those investigators? I suppose. Half of those guys probably would get thrown into law enforcement.
>> a lot of them are staying here overnight. They don't go home.
>> but unfortunately, using take-home vehicles is the number one thing that you go after. You're going after law enforcement. And I don't --
>> but if you take out law enforcement, you still have a whole lot of take-home vehicles. That's the problem.
>> well, he said that we've got 200 take-home vehicles. I mean, I don't know whether -- I don't know how that could be right given that we've got 500 sheriff's department vehicles and obviously they're not all take-home.
>> are you talking about patrol? Are you talking about all law enforcement? Because when you call it law enforcement, it covers the waterfront. Everybody is law enforcement. So if you're talking about the patrol, the person you expect to issue citations on the way home and back, you're more than likely to be talking about patrol than law enforcement. Do other law enforcement issue citations? Yes, but it's not mainstream. Mainstream to what they do on a day-to-day basis. That's the difference and that's the distinction that I'm trying to make. If you even allowed take-home vehicles for patrol, but not generically law enforcement, I still -- I think you're still making a step towards the containment of take-hoim vehicles.
>> well, I'm not saying that there probably aren't some vehicles in the sheriff's department between corrections and law enforcement and the definition that you've given, joe that shouldn't be looked at with regards to let's get creative with how we give those cars out. And I think all of us in this community want to see the patrol guys have their cars. I mean, I really don't care whether they -- you almost have to live in Williamson county, hays county or somewhere just to live in central Texas. That we're not asking people to monkey around here and try to find a way to bring the car in and here, you know, you take over the car and i'll get my car and go home. I'm comfortable with trying any of these things if we don't make it almost impossible for the true law enforcement -- what I call law enforcement person that needs the car. And I'm willing to ask the sheriff's department, you identify for us -- I think we've gone through this many a time. And that's a hard thing to do because everybody wants to justify why they want their car. I do think that's a tough decision that we as the Commissioners have to make. But boy, i'll tell you, when you take 280 take-home vehicles, I'm seeing most of those as sheriff's cars.
>> I'm seeing a lot in this report I like. I'm seeing a lot of things in this report I could like. And I'm seeing a lot of things in here that I think need a little bit more study, but are worth the effort, I think, to flesh out. In terms of what I like, the idea that we would increase the rental rate for the off-duty, non-county-related jobs is something that seems to make sense to me. That was something that I brought up about what is that rate and ought that not be picked up by those who are utilizing our vehicle? I don't know when the last time we looked at it.
>> Commissioner, we can -- I mean, we can take a look at it and see, but right now the current rate is $10 an hour.
>> but it doesn't have a mileage fee on it, does it?
>> no, ma'am, and we tried that a few years ago and it basically turned into a county nightmare in trying to keep track of all that. The other thing is that quite often the car is just driven to the site and turned off and parked. In the meantime that person is still paying $10 an hour for that car basically sitting thrand not even running. Of course, there's other situations like on road construction and other activities where the car is sitting there idle.
>> if we go with tnr's, it's an average of 40 miles round trip, there's just a standard mileage charge that gets added on. And I can live with that if it gets passed on. 40 miles times 36 cents is the ad-on that gets added on to each of those off-duty jobs. I think that can get us to both places. It wouldn't be a nightmare, it would be a standard 40 miles times the i.r.s. Mileage adds on. And it all helps. The other thing, the idea about the pools related to administration, is something that makes sense. And I would -- I don't know why some of that can't be done. The things that have to do with reducing the number of trips, shuttle services, looking at the mail runners, the group trips related to tnr. Of course, we have to figure out if there's parking available, safe parking available for somebody to be at a job site. Some of those things, yes, you do and some of those things, no, you don't. The fuel budget coming down, that's something that makes a lot of sense, forcing people to manage their budgets, I like that. In terms of the heavy equipment, I think you guys have raised a very good ideas there related to the consolidation east and west and renting heavy equipment as needed. That is something that makes sense now. I'd certainly lakelike to talk about the underutilization of the vehicles. There may be some that it makes absolute sense of those 33 and maybe some of those get pulled off of some of the small departments because it doesn't really get them anywhere. But that's one of -- we talked about that. The right sizing of the fleet, v-6's versus v-8's. That's something that makes absolute sense now. The personnel carriers makes sense, electric, whatever, that makes sense.
>> can you till us -- [ inaudible ].
>> I'm trying to stay away from the same thing that Commissioner Daugherty is bringing up as related to a flatout assumption of what the savings and cost are related to the take-home vehicles for the sheriff's office. I'm not there yet.
>> joe wants to know what action we will take in response to his hard work on this agonizing presentation.
>> I think page 12, page 12 kind of affects -- some of the first -- well, let's see. Certainly 11 spells out the vehicle and how we would approach that so that we don't affect the public safety.
>> it seems to me that's what the departments who have cars who are listed, they ought to see what the Commissioners court proposes to take action on. My representation would be that we have this on the court's agenda next Tuesday and at 1:30 tomorrow afternoon if we have ideas and we have a consensus for it, hopefully by text Tuesday we can also identify issues that in all probability we will kick over to next year.
>> absolutely.
>> but we can identify those that we are thinking about acting on immediately. My guess is those departments may well want to come by and check with us before we take that action. Do we have like a utilization record for the major departments on fuel and maintenance?
>> yes, sir.
>> I think that's fine.
>> so if we have questions that we want to ask, as we put our individual list together, should we send those to joe.
>> you want do it by e-mail anyway? Right? Who else is on the committee? [ laughter ]
>> he doesn't have a vehicle either.
>> you're not with the sheriff's office.
>> no, sir. [ laughter ]
>> we need full input from the department.
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> I want to tell you why I chose to do that. Because I really had to get in some vested interest, and I couldn't do it with the committee. You start with the strong recommendations, here we are. In the opinion of -- it's the opinion of two people who have dealt with fleet for a couple of years, we know how it works and we thought that at least you could see some of the things that can be done.
>> it was the opinion of three people, I might add. If what you have established as your desire to accomplish as the discipline behind it when you hear an awful lot of departments come to you and say, it won't work, you just had a little tiny indication of that so far. This has got to be a collaborative joint effort and the emergenciment and the staff needs -- management and the staff needs the air cover from the Commissioners court. If you want to move in the direction, we will help you, but we -- if it's -- it is going to be extraordinarily difficult adventure, if indeed you say move there, but the behavior is something else. When the departments, they will howl, they will scream, they will tell you that will not work. And if you poke at it, they will then give you more information about why it won't work. So it has to be this is the direction and we can help you get there. But having been there, it's --
>> are we able to look at what we pay for a standard size vehicle and what a smaller version for non-law enforcement work would cost?
>> yes, we can do that.
>> per unit?
>> not only capital cost, but the ongoing o and m cost.
>> if we could estimate that and estimate the approximate number of cars that we think may be affected in three years, and then the number we're looking at for '03. I would -- for '04, rather. I would think that '04 would be easy because we've already budgeted a certain number of cars, so it may then be pulling out ones that we think need to stay that size on one hand. On the other hand, how many we can reduce to the smaller size, still achieve the county's mission? And plug in the maintenance figure. I'd be interested in seeing that.
>> we have 1.6 million dollars' worth of replacement vehicles in the general fund car budget for the preliminary budget, which you will be asked to address. And $3.3 million in road and bridge. There's a total of 4.9 million dollars' worth of vehicles in the '04 budget.
>> okay. The other thing -- the fuel cost is a kind of tricky thing, but i'd be interested in seeing how much of this year's budget we project we will spend between now and September 30th. And I know the last month is really a projection. I guess the prices two months ago were significantly lower than today, right?
>> horks yeah. > so we've got to factor in, is there a projection that fiewlt prices will probably increase next year?
>> don't know.
>> so we don't audit to compare that, I guess, to if we reduce usage by implementing some of these steps, the question would be what do we do after the preliminary budget and is that amount excessive after we factor in some reduction? If it's five percent, so be it.
>> could we also have coordination with purchasing in terms of what's available off the state contract? Because if we're trying to do something that's not on a state contract, we may also be creating a different kind of procurement cost effort, etcetera, out of purchasing, whereas if it's on the state contract, it's just picking something different than what we're getting right now.
>> we have -- there's three, four interlocals that we have right now where we can almost go shopping, if you will. We have the buy board, which is the state association of school boards. We have a state contract. We have aghc and we have another county that we're in with also. Also, one of the other things I would like to maybe say the fleet is not in bad shape. I think we've been doing a good job. I've been thinking of buying impala's with v-6's in them. They're about two thousand dollars less a vehicle and they seem to be getting about 18, 19 miles to the gallon. We've been making progress. Maybe not as fast as i'd like it to be, but we're getting there. We've looked at electric parts that -- electric cars that we're getting at del valle. I've looked at four gasoline burning vehicles. The personnel department are using the personnel carriers when they need to be off road. We're gradually getting there. I don't think we're in bad shape. We're trying to tweak it out a little bit and we're on a tight budget for this year.
>> and you also have been visiting with other fleet managers and other large counties because if you switched vehicles you want to be sure what you're switching to has a good performance record from recalls, all those kinds of things such as you're picking something that's still a winner.
>> I have been talking to harris county, who has been buying giet quite a few of them. And they're still new. They haven't had any major problems with them yet, but the true test doesn't come until they hit around 70,000, 80,000 miles to see if the endurance is there on them. And they've been out on the market now for I think two or three years that we've been really purchasing them.
>> it's a vehicle that gets better miles to the gallon? What kind of car that? Not a beatle.
>> I think any number of sedans, smaller side sedans, I can't -- most of the trips are made on the management end are one-person trips. So you don't need a large vehicle to do those type of trips. Get a honda for that matter if you don't want to buy american vehicles. If you.
>> but you really pay, the japanese. They're great cars, but they're expensive.
>> there are plenty of american cars that are fuel pisht. You don't even have to go there. So it's just a matter of --
>> and so the constables for their civil processing are using sedans and there's no reason that they can't be more fuel efficient sedan and a smaller one. So that's not an issue? They're just delivering papers, run is law enforcement.
>> I don't necessarily disagree with joe on that. I think it's a valid point and it's something that was tried within the sheriff's office a few years ago when we went to get some more mid size or compact cars for a lot of our non-patrol law enforcement functions. The only thing I would just throw out there for food for thought is it does limit our ability to redeploy in the event that we have a patrol car that's totaled out or has some maintenance repair that need to be done that tnr has decided they're not going to fix or repair, then we have the ability to pull that car from somewhere else, put some graphics on it and some lights and we're ready to go as opposed to having to run without a vehicle or run out and trying to buy one to replace it.
>> I think we're talking, terry, about replacing all of those. Obviously you would have some of those that you could bring into there, but if you could find 25 percent of the fleet that you could do that with a smaller car. I think our taferk will be getting -- taferk will be getting smaller cars that are fuel efficient, that are sturdy enough to withstand, you know, the number of years and the dollars that you're going to pay for.
>> like I said, I think joe makes a valid point. I was just throwing that out there for food for thought because we have tried it. In some cases it works real well and other times it hasn't worked very well at all.
>> could I also get a report for next week as well related to the cost of wrecking vehicles. I see dan man sewer there. To be able to separate out for us the cost of replacing fleet where it was within the course and scope of duty, third party, basically the bad things happen, but it wasn't our fault versus the felony stupid di things of carelessness and where it was total aan asay voidable accident. I'm sure he can be of great help. I would like to see what the replacement costs are on avoidable accidents. And for us to create as well in that regard of holding departments more accountable. Because right now you wreck them, we fix them and it is charged to the general fund. It is not charged back to the departments. And joe, you're stepping on toes. I'm willing to step on a few more related to that in terms of getting more accountable in related to fleet. This is not an unlimited amount of money to replace wrecked vehicles and accidents that could have been avoided.
>> if we get our list to you by 5:00 o'clock Thursday, will you be able to combine them, get us the list back by 5:00 o'clock Friday. That's a full 24 hours.
>> that will give us some time.
>> as soon as you get any of the e-mails, we can work on it tomorrow and Thursday. So don't wait until Thursday to dump everything. But as get them, so we can work on them individually.
>> so if I lay out the recommendation, and my question is what's the impact of this, somebody will start working on that?
>> send it to us one at a time.
>> can I make just a few points? More I guess -- I guess again more for food for thought. In regards to the personal vehicle use listen law enforcement, I think Commissioner Sonleitner brought it up a minute ago about insurance. It's very difficult for law enforcement officers to get insurance and we've been told that we can't buy insurance for a vehicle that's going to be used for any type of emergency response. A lot of insurance companies even consider the mere fact that a radio may be in the vehicle, then they consider it an emergency vehicle, so the officers are told they can't even get insurance on their personal vehicles. The other thing in regards to the on-call, right now in the sheriff's office, we view a lot of people as being subject to call back and therefore we don't place a lot of people on call. I just want to remind the court that if any of that is implemented, there may be some compensation benefits that will have a significant impact on us. The 24/7 operation, I just want to say that when I first started here, that's the way the fleet was managed. The cars never showed up, the officers got in the car while it was still running and drove off. There were several times that there might be three and four officers right rooiding around in one car just because we didn't have any more cars that were operational or even able to be driven. And we're having to wait for the next budget cycle to get in to purchase the new cars. I'm note sure to just limit the fleet to what's nose a 24/7 operation is really practical. The other thing we run boo into is just personnel issues. At that time the day shift patrol was always referred to as the texaco shift because basically all you did is come in and pick up cars that needed to go -- needed maintenance and run them around to various shops and subsequently those patrol officers weren't out patrolling neighborhoods, they were sitting around these maintenance shops waiting for vehicles to get worked on. In regards to the 24/7 operation, it was mentioned that that's what the city of Austin does. I would like to point out the city of Austin also has 24/7 fleet maintenance shops that are available. So if there is something that happens with a vehicle that needs to be repaired, the officers can real easily slip into one of those maintenance centers and get it done any time of the day or not. I guess the other thing would be in the -- along the lines of vehicle maintenance that's been over this past year, actually January through June of this year, the officers -- the patrol officers themselves have expended over 900 man hours in just doing the vehicle maintenance on their off-duty time or on their own time. That's about all I have time to take note of right now.
>> okay. Thank you. We'll have that back on next Tuesday. We'll get y'all any recommendations, comments we have. Thank you very much.
Last Modified: Wednesday, September 3, 2003 7:52 AM