Number of state vehicles not a problem, Beebe says

— Gov. Mike Beebe sees no problems with the number of vehicles the state owns and he leaves it up to each agency to decide whether employees may be allowed to commute in one, his spokesman said Wednesday.

The size of the state’s fleet “hasn’t changed a whole lot” since Beebe took office, said spokesman Matt DeCample.

In 2007, there were 8,342 vehicles, and that has increased 311 to 8,653 now, De-Cample said.

Of those, about 1,000 are allowed for commuting, according to data received Wednesday by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from the state Department of Finance and Administration and the state Highway and Transportation Department.

DeCample said the governor’s office has reviewed the state-vehicle situation in more detail recently given questions raised after news articles in the newspaper this month reported that most state constitutional officers weren’t paying taxes for their personal use of state vehicles.

“The governor is always concerned about using our taxpayer resources and funds as efficiently as we can,” DeCample said. “Having said that, once you start breaking it down, more than half [of the vehicles] we [the governor’s office] don’t have control over.”

He said 4,603 are from entities not under the governor’s direction - colleges and universities, the Game and Fish Commission, the Highway Department and the Legislature and elected officials.

“He doesn’t see any systemwide problems,” DeCample said. “When it comes to the agencies we have control over, we don’t see any vehicles that aren’t justified by the services those people provide.”

But DeCample said the governor questions the number of vehicles at colleges and universities - 1,492. He said “that’s not an allegation” but the governor doesn’t have information to judge whether those vehicles are necessary.

Beebe of Searcy, a former legislator and attorney general, is running for re-election this year against Republican Jim Keet, a restaurant owner from Little Rock.

Keet has called for a ban on elected officials’ and state employees’ use of state vehicles to commute.

“It is inexcusable this had gone on for 3 1 /2 years under the governor’s watch,” Keet said at a news conference Monday. “In the Keet administration, these abuses would be brought to a screeching halt. Period.”

Keet also noted a Democrat-Gazette article Sunday that reported the difficulties finance department officials had in tallying up state vehicles.

“If a CEO of a business had this kind of lack of accountability in the way they ran their business, they would be fired,” Keet said. “The people of Arkansas deserve better.As governor, I can assure you I would take a hands-on approach to get to the bottom of this and other abuses.”

DeCample said that “just because someone calls something an abuse” doesn’t mean there is abuse in the use of state vehicles. He said the state’s allowing people to drive vehicles home doesn’t equate to abuse.

He rejected Keet’s criticism of a lack of data on the vehicles.

“It was all gathered and handed over [to the newspaper] in a couple of days,” DeCample said.

He asserted that only “128 out of 8,600” vehicles are used for commuting. He later changed 128 to 132.

Last week the finance department said that 414 employees pay taxes for their use of state vehicles for commuting.

That figure didn’t include the Highway Department or colleges and universities.

Attempting to gather an accurate count of vehicles used for commuting again proved difficult Wednesday.

Randy Ort, a spokesman for the Highway Department, said Wednesday that his agency has 579 vehicles used for commuting.

Those Highway Department vehicles, combined with the initial list of 414, bring the number to 993.

The finance department counted 72 from colleges and universities, which would raise the total commuting to 1,065.

That figure doesn’t include vehicles used in offices by elected officials and theirstaffs and also doesn’t include some law-enforcement vehicles that are allowed for commuting but are exempt in regard to paying income tax for that use.

But Richard Weiss, director of the Department of Finance and Administration, said his “educated guess” from “years of judgment working on this stuff” is that vehicles used for commuting in agencies under the governor’s control number 60.

But on the list of 414, vehicles from agencies under the governor’s control number 179.

Weiss said he got his estimate of 60 from a different list of 292 employees who use vehicles for commuting.

He said he whittled the 292 down to 60 by excluding some vehicles he doesn’t think should be on the list, such as forest rangers who take their vehicles home. He said these are people who could be called out in the middle of the night for state business.

At least one agency - the Arkansas State Police - was on the list of 414 but not the list of 292.

Weiss said he couldn’t explain that. He said it may have to do with how agencies report numbers to the finance department.

“There is no central depository for all that information,” Weiss said. “There is tons of information kept, but none is easily adaptable for a [newspaper] story.”

Beebe has issued 21 declarations allowing agencies to purchase more vehicles than the limit in state law, which allows 7,771. The law that sets the limit also allows the governor to allow agencies to exceed their limits in this way.

DeCample said those caps for agency vehicles haven’t been adjusted in “some time. If there is a need for an influx of vehicles, then we have to sign the declaration, which is what we’ve done.”

Those declarations have allowed 182 vehicles. Other sections of the law appear to allow certain exemptions for the Department of Human Services and colleges and universities.

DeCample emphasized that Beebe’s declarations allowed new vehicles for the struggling Children and Family Services Division to help it give more attention to foster children, and for the Community Correction Department to beef up the number of parole officers monitoring felons.

The Internal Revenue Service and the state finance department consider commuting in a company or state vehicle to be a taxable personal-use benefit. At the same time, the state’s policy on vehicle use says that it can be done only for official business.

Under that policy, authorized commuting in a state vehicle isn’t considered bythe state to be personal use although it does treat it as taxable, and thus presumably personal, use.

DeCample said the “definition of commuting” and “what is considered personal use” varies, depending on the application.

Of the 8,653 state vehicles, according to DeCample:

3,003 are in the Game and Fish Commission and the Highway Department.

1,492 in colleges and universities

1,823 in law-enforcement agencies.

775 in natural resource agencies

570 in the Health and Human Services departments.

108 offices of legislative branch and elected officials.

882 for state boards and commissions.

He provided the number of vehicles for each of the past 10 years starting in 2001, when Mike Huckabee, a Republican, was governor. That year there were 7,770 vehicles, which grew to 8,508 by the time Huckabee left office in 2006.

What do the vehicles cost to buy?

The finance department said the average per-year purchasing cost during the past five years was $9 million for an average of 518 vehicles.

From April 1, 2009, to March 31, 2010, it cost $17.3 million to maintain, repair, fuel and insure the state fleet.

These figures include higher-education institutions and executive branch state agencies but not the Game and Fish Commission or the Highway Department, said Stan King, the finance department’s chief information officer.

King said that to add a vehicle to its fleet, an agency must:

Provide written explanation of the need.

Justify the type vehicle requested.

Show that average miles of the agency fleet is more than 12,000.

To replace a vehicle, an agency must seek the same type of vehicle or give written reason for a change. And the vehicle being replaced must either be 5 years old, have 75,000 miles on it or need repairs costing at least 50 percent of wholesale value.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/29/2010

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