County right to rethink vehicle tracking mandate
Taylor County leaders are right to rethink a vehicle tracking policy in light of higher than anticipated costs.
Earlier this year, the county board adopted a new personnel policy requiring all county-owned vehicles to have GPS tracking devices installed in them. The stated reason for the policy change was to increase safety for county employees, such as those in human services who travel throughout the county doing home visits.
It is also no coincidence that the push for a policy change gained traction after the sheriff received a traffic ticket while driving a Taylor County-owned vehicle in another county. This was on top of persistent speculation about potential personal use of county vehicles by former employees that fueled calls for increased accountability.
Mandating GPS tracking of countyowned vehicles promised to do both, providing a way to locate staff regardless of cellphone coverage while also tracking where the vehicles went to monitor for potential misuse.
As with many things, what promised to be a solution to one set of problems created an entirely new one.
Taylor County is in a perpetual budget crunch. Fiscally conservative county board members actively work to reduce, or at least slow down, the amount of spending by the county. The cost of $20 per month for the tracking devices and service, initially seemed reasonable with the $360 per year, per vehicle cost being manageable to fit into departmental budgets.
This is, however, until it comes to the highway department. At the time the policy was being discussed, board members were told the patrol trucks already had monitoring on them. This is only partially accurate as only some of the patrol trucks have the devices. With a fleet of more than 50 vehicles in use by the highway department, along with another 30 pieces of road equipment, the costs quickly mounted, especially with the equipment needing special wiring work done to install devices. Highway commissioner Ben Stanfley noted the cost would be the equivalent of purchasing a new pickup truck every other year.
Faced with the reality of these expenses, the county’s personnel committee on Monday made the right call in asking for the policy to be modified to give more power to oversight committees to determine what vehicles needed the monitoring devices. This change injects some much-needed common sense into the policy, allowing the county to factor in cost when making decisions about vehicle tracking.
