Still incompetent after all these years ..

http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051026/OPINION/510260394/1030

Comparing county vehicle fleet sizes meaningless
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 10/26/05
BY THOMAS J. POWERS
Once again, the Press has published an article under the banner of "news" that was critical of Monmouth County. This newspaper's latest muckraking of the county's vehicle fleet carried no news, only the goal of furthering its own political agenda. ("Driving ahead: Monmouth's fleet now leads state," Oct. 16.) County staff members have spent several weeks engaged in an ongoing dialogue with your reporter, and the fleet information was fully explained.
Early this year, reporters from this newspaper requested a list of vehicles approved for commutation. Soon afterward, those same reporters asked for a vehicle inventory. We queried our database for "fleet vehicles" and supplied them with that list. However, due to the way our database was constructed and categorized, that search resulted in some categories of vehicles being omitted. We have since streamlined the database to avoid this confusion. At no time were any vehicles unaccounted for. To imply otherwise is irresponsible.

Mr. Powers, to imply that you know what you do not know is irresponsible as well.  To imply that a problem was fixed when indeed it has not been is irresponsible also,
I posted a few days ago about the incompetent management of Monmouth County’s fleet.  Powers is one of the county commissioners, elected to serve the people and watch out for this kind of scandalous mismanagement.  
Read his article carefully.  It’s nothing but a string of excuses and obfuscations.  “At no time were any vehicles unaccounted for  ...”  Well hello, Mr. Powers, you queried your system for a count of vehcuiles and some vehicles were not accounted for.  The fact that after the newspaper took you to task you fumbled around and found errors in the system (who paid for that system and who trained county personnel in its use, by the way?  County the number of vehicles you own isn’t exactly rocket science..). Anyway, the fact that you manually found the vehicles in question after not being able to find them the first time via your official accounting system tells me that yes, indeed, vehicles were unaccounted for.  To my mind I still have no confidence that you have found all the vehicles yet.

Again I implore my readers to get on the backs of those who manage your government fleets and force them to be accountable.  Passing off bogus information and then back-pedaling and revising the info when a newspaper reporter proves he or she knows more than the responsible officials is not acceptable performance.  You can talk about how many people in the world love the smell, but rotten cheese still stinks no matter what kind of face you try to put on it.

California's Missing Vehicle Dilemma

http://www.telematicsjournal.com/content/topstories/982.html

Well, here we are folks, once again, another state who can't find a huge percentage of their vehicles.

The article I link to above actually promotes one of my competitors ... but I don't care. I'm so heartily sick of the head-in-the sand attitude of many of today's fleet managers that I don't care if they buy from a competitor, as long as the buy.

An average state vehicle represents an initial investment in the $20K range. Over the life of the vehicle the tax payer can count on spending that much and more in maintenance and fuel. Yet managers seem to think it's totally acceptable to have thousands of vehicles and hundreds of thousands of miles of use completely un-accounted for.

Next Tuesday I vote in a state election (Colorado) where the major ballot question regards letting the state keep a budget surplus that they are legally obligated to return to the tax payers. You just might be able to guess which way I am going to vote on that issue.

It's your tax dollar. Are you going to hold your state, county and city accountable, or are you going to let them play golf on the waste, which originally was yours?