Despite recent reports of public officials in the country abusing city-issued, take-home cars, the City of Athens sees only a third of the employees taking home cars as it did five years ago.
Other cities in the country have run into problems with loaning out city-owned cars. Earlier this week, the cousin of a Massachusetts mayor was arrested for allegedly drunk driving a city-owned car. In Pittsburgh, it took a recently-terminated police spokesperson seven days after being fired to return the city-owned car. Last September, Hartford, Conn., cut back on its city-owned vehicles to save money.
“We have changed policies regarding that five years ago,” said Mayor Paul Wiehl. He said the only employees who get to take home city-owned vehicles “are the people who have to first respond whenever things happen 24/7, and K-9; their train dogs need to be taken good care of.”
Only four positions in the city — police chief, fire chief, police captain and police K-9 unit — get to take home these cars.
Before the city revised its policy on take-home cars, Wiehl estimated 13 city employees were taking home the cars.
The reduction of those taking vehicles home was “to pare down cost,” Wiehl said.
He said all the vehicles are Ford SUVs. Police Chief Tom Pyle has a hybrid Ford Escape, and the others are regular Ford Explorers.
“We do have a Green Fleets policy and committee that examines our vehicle inventory. We, in the past, would use our older police cars as ‘hand-me-downs’ for other departments and still do to a certain extent, but we are now more aggressive in replacing the gas guzzlers,” said Wiehl.
Before the city changed its policy, employees such as the service safety director, plant operators and utility crew supervisors were allowed to take home cars, Wiehl said.
Athens Service Safety Director Paula Horan-Moseley was one of the officials who was allowed to take city cars home.“I personally chose to give up the benefit for myself as well,” she said. “I believe the revision was necessary as we had far too many take-home vehicles that were utilized only sporadically for significant events.”
Wiehl said the vehicles run on city gas. “How much is spent would depend on miles driven or how often the employees are called out for their job,” he said.
“We follow IRS regulations for reporting usage — there is a per diem assessment that is reported for tax purposes, currently $3.00 per day,” said Horan-Moseley
Dan Inman, a junior studying industrial hygiene said he sees no problem in this. “Government officials are paid to do their jobs and if the city cars are helping them out with that, I don’t see any problem with it,” he said. “Also, the number went down from 13 to 4, so (it) seems like city is not wasting the money either, which is good.”
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