County employees and take-home cars

Communication Manager Karen Pan in the Office of the County Administrator gave a detailed response for a Historic City News reader, who happens to be a County Commissioner, as to the policy criteria for any County vehicle that is taken home by an employee.

According to Pan’s response, reviewing take-home vehicles is “one of the many good management initiatives” the County has undertaken since Michael Wanchick became County Administrator in 2007.

An estimated 75, or more, vehicles were going home with employees prior to this review and development of a strict policy, which was implemented in 2009.

The criteria for 24-hour vehicle assignments are as follows:

• Per position job description and/or scope of responsibilities, County employee subject to service calls on a 24-hour basis or requiring specially equipped vehicles or special tools and/or radio communications from a 24-hour base station.

• It must be established the County employee has been, and is, required to respond to situations critical to the County’s health, safety and welfare operations from his/her residence during off duty hours.

• The delay caused by transit from the employee’s home to retrieve a County vehicle from an approved parked location prior to responding to the service call would impede the County’s operations or constitute a life safety or public welfare issue.

• Only those County employees who reside within St. Johns County will be eligible for 24-hour vehicle assignment.

Keep in mind that the policy with each constitutional officer is different.

For example, the Sheriff makes his own policy regarding eligibility to take home a marked or unmarked patrol vehicle and under what restrictions, if any, the employee can use the vehicle to conduct personal business, use the vehicle when the employee is off-duty, if, and when, employees can allow civilian passengers to ride in the County vehicle, use of County gasoline for personal travel in a County vehicle, and limitations, if any, on the employee’s county of residence.

As far as vehicles under management of the Board of County Commissioners is concerned, there are no vehicles designated “take-home” simply as a benefit or perk of the job.

According to Pan, all “take-home” vehicles are directly related to assigned job functions and fall into one of these two categories:

• Non-personal Use Vehicles (work trucks) – Vehicle a County employee is not likely to use more than minimally for personal purposes because of its design – this includes emergency fire and rescue vehicles, animal control containment/transportation vehicles, specialized utility repair trucks, traffic-signal repair trucks, etc. These vehicles are required to respond quickly to emergency off-hours situations to restore or maintain services in a timely manner.

• 24-Hour Vehicle – County-owned vehicles authorized to be used by a County employee and available 24 hours each day to perform duties of the position. These are more traditional vehicles (sedans, pick-up trucks, etc.) and assigned only to employees on-call 24 hours and expected to respond quickly to emergency situations. Examples of staff with approval for these vehicles are the Medical Examiner office, Facilities Maintenance staff, Utilities repair staff, etc.

To summarize, vehicles only go home with an employee if the position requires after-hours responsiveness that is critical to their specific job. Also, most of the vehicles that go home are not assigned to a specific employee but rather a rotation of whichever staff member is on-call at a specific time. For example, if four traffic technicians rotate who is on-call to address after-hours traffic signal problems, only the one on-call takes a vehicle home; the other three do not.

With all that said, there are approximately 30 take-home vehicles authorized for the purpose of after-hours call-outs for service that will not wait until the next working day.

No personal use of these vehicles is authorized, and most vehicles are work trucks that do not lend themselves to personal transportation.

The estimated cost of after-hours vehicle use is approximately $30,000 annually.

However, this expense is offset by the reduced travel distance and improved response times resulting when workers travel directly from their residences to a work site where after hours work is required.

Photo credits: © 2011 Historic City News archive photograph