Driven into the ground

The city of Atlanta boasts a fleet of nearly 7,000 vehicles -- everything from cop cars, vans and garbage trucks to those small motorized moon units that police the parks.

When one of them breaks down, or when it needs routine maintenance, it's brought to a city garage, otherwise known as the Bureau of Motor Transport Services.

Unofficially, it might as well be called the Island of Mismanaged Mechanics.

That's the impression one gets, anyway, after perusing the city's own audit of the department. Certainly it shows what may await Mayor-elect Shirley Franklin, who has promised audits of all city departments. Among the gems: In 2000, the bureau's 239 employees racked up 51,000 hours of overtime, 11 times more than what was budgeted for the department. That's four hours of overtime a week for each employee. The cost? $1.18 million. They bested that figure a year earlier when they soaked up $1.69 million in OT.

Predictably, the department has been a favorite whipping boy for city politicians. In his unsuccessful bid to become Atlanta's next mayor, Robb Pitts singled out Motor Transport as the department in need of privatization, cost-cutting or carpet bombing. It is a depository for politically connected layabouts with an annual budget of $24.8 million, he said.

Two months ago, Pitts introduced a bill, which currently sits in front of the council's finance committee, to privatize Motor Transport. It's unlikely it will pass before a new council takes office in January.

The audit, meanwhile, gave Pitts some political ammo, although it doesn't advocate the sweeping changes he suggests. It prescribes privatization of the parts department alone.

"There's some good people there, but it's top heavy," Pitts says of the department. The audit concurs. In cities such as Charlotte and Miami, there are three mechanics for every four support staff members. In Atlanta, it's two to four.

"Even the friends of [Jonathan Dodd, the Motor Transport's acting head] say he does not know what's going on," Pitts continues. "We need a true professional, someone with experience in Motor Transport."

Dodd's own employment record with the city is not without blemishes. Over a three-year period in the mid-1990s, he was involved in three accidents in city vehicles and was suspended without pay for getting repairs done at an unauthorized body shop, according to news reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Dodd did not return phone calls for this story.

Completed in June and commissioned by Chief Financial Officer David Corbin, the audit shows a department badly out of step with the industry, a group that overspends its budget and yet "customers indicated that [Motor Transport] takes too long to service/repair motorized equipment," it reports. It takes nearly eight days longer than the industry average to repair passenger cars and light trucks, partly because its equipment is outdated.

Among some of the findings:

Equipment maintenance and repair costs for the same style vehicles differ widely among the bureau's 14 facilities.

In 1999, even though the city's fleet was cut by about 1,000 vehicles, department expenses went up by 3 percent.

Staff spent just over 50 percent of their time doing work for which it could account, meaning time spent actually repairing vehicles. "The question is, what are they doing the rest of the time?" Pitts says. The industry standard for billable activity is 65-75 percent, but Atlanta doesn't even have a goal for its performance. The bureau itself managed to reach the 70 percent threshold during the early 1990s.

Motor Transport contracts only 5 percent of its work to other companies; departments in comparable cities outsource 20 to 30 percent of their work.

What's more, the audit concludes that Motor Transport management structure is outmoded, its equipment outdated and that the fleet's age could limit the city's ability to provide services -- like trash collection and park maintenance -- to citizens in the future.

The audit recommends a number of changes including abolishing or transferring 21 positions -- 15 of those transfers would come from the Management Services Division. Also, the study advocates privatizing the parts operation in 2002 and reducing the number of repair facilities. It also calls for setting actual performance goals and selling off under-used vehicles -- those with fewer than 7,500 annual miles, about half the fleet, excluding police patrol cars. If all the changes are made, the audit concludes, the city will save nearly $14 million over the next four years and more than $3 million next year alone.

With her own audit bonanza set to begin in January, the question for Franklin is whether she will move forward on the Motor Transport recommendations.

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