State workers drive on your dime

by JAN MURPHY, The Patriot-News
Sunday May 11, 2008, 4:00 AM

With gasoline approaching $4 a gallon, driving to and from work has become a costly endeavor for most people.

But not for 3,650 state employees.

You pay for their commutes.

In addition to providing vehicles for full-time use by Cabinet officers, deputy secretaries, chief counsels, bureau directors and state troopers, among others, taxpayers pick up the cost of maintaining, servicing, insuring and fueling those vehicles.

The annual cost to taxpayers is about $15.6 million, according to an investigation by The Patriot-News as part of a look at how state tax dollars are spent. That figure is based on the state's $4,274 yearly cost-per-vehicle figure included in the governor's budget.

The cars aren't only for work-related use. Some employees are explicitly permitted to use their state cars for personal use, said Gov. Ed Rendell's spokesman Chuck Ardo, who was assigned his own state vehicle last week.

Ardo defended the administration's practices and policies regarding the permanent assignment of state cars to individual employees.

"Many of those who drive state cars travel extensively as part of their duties," Ardo said. "While some travel less extensively, they are out routinely on state business. Many others who are assigned state cars are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Still, Barry Kauffman, the executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a public watchdog group, said he was astounded that 3,650 state workers fall into those permitted categories.

"That's an extraordinary amount," Kauffman said. "It seems there needs to be an effort afoot to totally re-evaluate the policy on state cars. It's just beyond my ability to understand why we need to have 3,650 employees with permanently assigned cars."

Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati, R-Jefferson County, and Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware County, requested that Auditor General Jack Wagner audit of the use of state cars, particularly those used by the executive branch agencies, statewide row offices and independent state agencies.

"It appears ... there are people who may have the use of a state vehicle for what is essentially a short commute to their place of employment in Harrisburg and are permitted to use the vehicle for their personal use," they said in a letter to Wagner. "That's what we're trying to determine."

About a dozen complaints have been made to The Patriot-News in the last year from current and former state workers who said co-workers use their state vehicles predominantly for commuting to and from work.

People have also complained about seeing state employees driving the cars to the grocery store or movie theater.

Then there was the state car that was involved in a hit-and-run crash on Route 15 in Lower Allen Twp. in November 2006, which resulted in the drunken-driving conviction of Michael Farnan, the former chief counsel for the state Department of Corrections.

Wagner greeted Pileggi's request for an audit warmly. The auditor general said this has been an area of special interest to him, particularly in light of the rising costs of gasoline and automobiles. He said his department has been reviewing its policy since the beginning of this year, with an eye toward curbing those costs.

The state policy dictating which employees can have full-time access to state cars specifies they are limited to "Cabinet officials, deputy secretaries or equivalents, and members of the governor's staff of equivalent rank." It also includes people whose jobs require them to be on call or who continually travel on state business. Individual departments can have their own rules.

Ardo said that except for certain law-enforcement officials, employees must pay federal income tax for use of state-provided cars. The value of that noncash income varies by the type of vehicle, and not the miles traveled, said Ed Myslewicz, a spokesman for the Department of General Services.

He said the department requires employees who have state cars to report the miles driven at the end of a month with no detail about the purpose of travel, whether business or personal, or the destinations.

Ardo said about 300 of the vehicles assigned to employees for full-time use belong to agencies under the governor's jurisdiction.

That does not include the state police, which had the largest number of all the agencies, with 2,015, according to a list updated two weeks ago by General Services.

State police employees with take-home privileges are troopers who can be called to respond to a police incident at any hour or who travel regularly because of their duties, spokesman Jack Lewis said.

Or they are specialized officers who may be called to travel 100 miles or more from where they are stationed. Some are commissioned officers who regularly travel throughout the state providing training and assistance, Lewis said.

"State police truly is a department that operates on wheels, and I think that is reflected in the assignment of vehicles," he said.

Ardo said access to pool cars doesn't cut it for employees, such as himself, who can be asked to report to work 24/7.

"Clearly, trying to find a pool car in the middle of the night or on a holiday would present a problem," he said.

Rendell administration officials said that since 2003, the size of the state fleet has declined. The state budget book shows that in 2004-05, the fleet comprised 16,544 vehicles, compared with 16,307 this year. That total includes tractors, trucks and grounds equipment. The book does not indicate how many of those are assigned to individual employees.

Administration officials also said the mileage limit for vehicle replacements has been extended from 65,000 miles in 2003, when Rendell took office, to 100,000 for passenger cars and to 120,000 for commercial and sport utility vehicles.

Additionally, the state has purchased 53 hybrid cars since 2005. Fourteen of them are assigned to the Department of Corrections, which has found them to be a money-saver because they are powered by electricity when officers do their low-speed patrols, Myslewicz said.

Other states also have begun moving to hybrids. Some have made more significant cutbacks in their assignment of what some refer to as "take-home" vehicles to state employees. Maryland, for example, eliminated cars to staffers as a cost-cutting move last year, an official in the governor's office said.

Ohio abandoned the practice of providing state cars for its Cabinet officers several years ago, moving to a monthly vehicle allowance for them.

Ron Sylvester, the director of Ohio's Department of Administrative Services, said the only state employees there who have cars are family service caseworkers, state plumbing inspectors and others who travel daily.

Sylvester said those state cars are not permitted to be used for personal travel. They bear special license plates that help Ohio residents track any misuse. The first two numbers on those plates identify the department to which the cars are assigned, which aids his department in identifying employees misusing their vehicles, he said.

Pileggi liked the idea of the special license plates. State cars assigned to employees have standard Pennsylvania license plates.

"It would certainly deter improper use or private use of a vehicle that is intended to be used for state purposes," he said.

The state fleet in New Jersey has been reduced by 1,000 vehicles in the last two years, said Thomas Vincz of the New Jersey's treasurer's office. Vehicles there also are kept on the road longer and must have at least 125,000 miles -- up from the 70,000 minimum in 2001 -- before they are replaced with more fuel-efficient models.

That state allows Cabinet officers and key members of the governor's staff to have state vehicles, Vincz said. But other employees, with few exceptions, must drive more than 1,250 business miles a month on official state business to be assigned cars full time, Vincz said.

Personal use of those cars is not permitted and is tracked through vehicle logs that employees keep, which denote the time and mileage for all stops, including lunch and breaks.

In Pennsylvania's auditor general's office, Wagner said a cost-benefit analysis determined that if an employee drove a personal vehicle a minimum of 1,000 miles a month, it was less expensive to provide him or her a car than to pay the IRS mileage reimbursement rate. "But those cars are to be used only for business purposes," Wagner said.

The list of 46 state agencies that have employees with full-time access to state vehicles includes the House and Senate.

All but one of those 111 vehicles are assigned to lawmakers. A Jeep Grand Cherokee is listed as assigned to House Chief Clerk Roger Nick, but Nick said that is an error. He has never had a General Services vehicle assigned to him, he said.

In 2006, the Senate curtailed the benefit that allowed members to spend up to $600 a month each on taxpayer-reimbursed car leases. The House followed suit in 2007 by eliminating its option for members to spend up to $650 a month each for privately leased cars. Now legislators can seek mileage reimbursement or use state cars.

But with the rising cost of vehicles, House members, like the Senate Republicans and the auditor general, are questioning this benefit awarded to some state employees, said House Republican spokesman Steve Miskin.

"For an administration that says they are continuing a program of cutting costs and running state government as efficiently as possible, you really got to question the judgment of just blindly giving out cars as an automatic perk," he said.

Source: The Patriot-News