Good afternoon, everyone.

I am Councilmember Fred Flickinger and Chair of the City of Houston Government Operations Committee.

Go ahead and uh get this started.

Uh call the meeting to order.

I would like to welcome uh staff we have in attendance.

We have staff from Tarsha Jackson's office from Councilwoman Tiffany Thomas's office, Councilman Joaquin Martinez, and Mayor Pro Tam, Martha Castex Tatum, and Councilwoman Sally Alcorn.

If there are any members of the public that would like to participate.

Oh, also Vice Mayor Pro Tim Amy Peck.

Thank you, Amy.

Um, if there are any members of the public that would like to participate in public comment, there's a sign-in sheet in the front at the table.

And uh director of fleet management, Gary Glascock.

If you want to come in and provide your presentation.

There we go.

Okay, well, good afternoon, Chair and Committee members.

As uh stated, I'm Gary Glascock, the director of the fleet management uh department.

With me today is Assistant Director Lisa Jefferson.

Together we'll be presenting information on the city's home storage vehicle program.

Next slide, please.

Is it up?

There we go.

Okay, we'll start today's presentation with information on city policy and agreements cover covering the use of home storage vehicles.

We'll then give a usage overview by city department along with program costs, and finally, we'll talk a bit about the travel distances between employee homes and work.

Next slide, please.

Okay, we'll start with uh policy.

First, I want to define exactly what a home storage vehicle is.

A home storage vehicle is a city vehicle assigned to an employee for travel between home and work and is kept at the employee's home while off duty.

City administration administrative policy 2-2 provides the guidelines for the assignment and use of these vehicles.

The policy gives department directors authority to assign home storage vehicles to employees that report to various work sites, are placed on call, or may be required to provide emergency services outside of normal business hours.

Assignments are allowed only for employees that live within 30 miles of City Hall unless an exception is granted by the mayor or mayor designee.

Now the police department has a modified maximum home distance of 40 miles from police headquarters, while the airport system just recently received approval to base the 30-mile distance limitation at airport locations.

Some other important policy terms.

Employees assigned home storage vehicles must authorize a bi-weekly paycheck deduction to reimburse the city for non work travel unless exempted by the mayor or the mayor's designee.

Now we'll say the previous administration formally delegated mayor approval authority relative to home storage vehicles to the chiefs of police and fire, the director of public works, and myself.

So all of these individuals serve as the mayor's designee relative to the policy terms of AP 2-2 when it comes to home storage vehicles.

Also worth noting, the labor agreement between the firefighters and association and the city include terms that provide home storage vehicles privileges for arson investigators and fire inspectors.

So this totals about 197 employees there.

Next slide, please.

At the end of calendar year 2025, city departments reported use of 1,386 home storage vehicles.

The three departments listed at the top of the table, police, fire, and public works were responsible for more than 94% of that total.

The miles travel column of the table provides some perspective on usage.

And that total was 20.2 million miles for 2025 with a unit average of 14,549 miles.

And almost all of these vehicles are used for home storage are light duty vehicles such as sedans, SUVs, and pickups.

There are 57 special built heavy duty vehicles, though, that uh that go home as well.

Next slide, please.

Moving to program costs, it's very important uh that I point this out.

The costs that we're presenting include both work and home travel.

Ideally, we would have treated the two types of travel independently.

However, to normalize cost figures across all departments, the two are combined because home locations are not reported by all departments, and because home storage vehicles are not operated uniformly.

So the police department does not report employee addresses for security reasons.

When it comes to operation, some of the home storage vehicles will travel to the same work spot every day, while others travel to a different location each day based on assignment.

So we don't get the same types of travel across uh all the departments.

So in order to normalize the cost, we included both home travel and work travel.

So the uh table here lists the calendar year 2025 fuel and maintenance costs for the fleet of home storage vehicles, 2.6 million dollars in fuel was purchased in 2025 to travel the 20.2 million miles with an average fuel consumption rate of 19.6 miles per gallon.

The uh maintenance costs totaling $3.6 million that are listed here, include all scheduled and unscheduled maintenance as well as accident repairs and tires.

The average uh per unit fuel and maintenance cost for vehicle in 2025 was a little less than 4,500 dollars, almost uh 31 cents a mile.

Next slide, please.

This table covers the city's cost of acquiring home storage vehicles.

We use a five-year straight line depreciation model to account for vehicle capital costs.

At the bottom of columns three and four, you'll see that 560 home storage vehicles were responsible for a little more than $4 million in depreciation in calendar 2025.

Now the city also leases vehicles.

The fire department spends almost all of its fleet capital funding on firefighting apparatuses and uh apparatus and ambulances and makes use of leases to provide for much of its light duty fleet.

In calendar year 2025, 134 lease vehicles were used for home storage at a cost of almost one and a half million dollars.

So the total acquisition cost for home storage vehicles in 2025 was $5.6 million.

Now it's very important again that we point out that we only depreciate those vehicles that are five years of age or newer, anything over five years has already been fully depreciated, and those capital costs do not roll into these cost figures.

Next slide, please.

Earlier in the presentation, I mentioned that uh employees assigned home storage privileges are required to authorize bi-weekly paycheck deductions to reimburse the city for non-city business driving.

The current paycheck deduction is 116 dollars, a little over $3,000 a year is the cost to the employee that participates in this program.

In uh 2025, $2.7 million was collected from 1,032 employees.

All but 13 of the paycheck deduction participants work for the police department.

And I might say that the police department did ask me to point this out.

Next slide, please.

So getting to the uh to the total, including all the costs and the revenue.

The uh the annual cost of the home storage program in 2025 was a little more than 9 million dollars, with uh unit cost of $6,518, which uh comes to about 45 cents a mile.

And so as the fleet department, we look at these costs closely compared to industry standards.

What we find is uh in current publications are uh ballpark figures running from about 50 cents a mile to a dollar per mile based on where you're located geographically within within the states, and and of course that also varies with fuel costs.

Uh so we think we're doing pretty well at 45 uh cents a mile.

The uh that we also compare to the IRS and GSA rates for mileage, and uh the rate for 2025 was 70 cents a mile, so we're considerably lower than uh than that particular rate.

Next slide, please.

We recently received some questions uh related to the assessment of imputed income for uh employees that drive a city vehicle to their home on a daily basis.

Uh IRS publication 15B excuses imputed income for government employees operating home storage vehicles that are marked specifically as police, fire, or public safety vehicles.

Utility trucks are also included in that.

To our knowledge, the only home storage vehicles operating without markings are police unmarked units, which are also covered or exempted by the uh IRS publication.

And and uh I'll also say that the marking of city vehicles is actually a state law, so we shouldn't have any running around without markings other than the unmarked uh police vehicles.

Next slide, please.

Non-work travel is defined as the one-way travel distance from work to an employee's home.

We have 603 records of uh non-work travel information submitted by the respective owning departments.

As mentioned previously, the police department does not submit officer home locations.

Uh based on the records that we have, 44 of the 603 reports indicate a non-work travel distance greater than allowed by policy.

And something I want to point out there, that those 44 are the 44 we went in and verified.

And so there were actually 61 reports by the different departments of folks operating vehicles beyond the 30 mile radius.

But what we found is uh we use the the 30 mile radius based on as the crow flies, if you will, and some of these reports were based on actual road miles to get to their homes, and so that cut down the number a little bit.

In addition, as I mentioned earlier, the airport was recently uh authorized to to drop the center of the 30 mile radius upon airport locations, so that cut back uh a couple of units as well.

I do want to report the the greatest reported uh current distance traveled uh from City Hall is 77 miles.

I think we said that was uh Livingston.

We've got an employee driving in and out from Livingston to uh and at this at this point that's that's the uh greatest distance that we have on record.

Next slide, please.

Incidents of emergency report.

We wanted to provide some context for how often uh these vehicles are actually being called in outside of normal business hours.

Um what we found as we surveyed each department, in most cases, this is not a number that's specifically tracked.

So they had to dig up through some records and uh and made some approximations.

And uh so you'll see there at the uh right column of the table, the uh the number of reported uh occurrences where a home storage vehicle or an a home storage vehicle employee, I should say, was called out after hours to report to an incident.

And uh, and as expected, you could see that the uh police department uh has by far the fi highest rate in that six-month period, followed by the uh fire department.

And uh Chief Munoz asked me specifically to emphasize how important these home storage vehicles are to his operation as well as to his response time, and uh uh to hopefully make that that that clear to you all.

So as we look at uh the uh the table here, approximately a little over 9,000 incidents of call outs within the last uh six months.

Uh next slide, please.

And uh finally we'll come to you uh to questions.

Thank you.

Appreciate the presentation.

Uh also want to uh recognize uh we have staff from Councilwoman Twilight Carter and also staff from Councilwoman Alejandra Salinas that is joined us.

Uh couple questions I've got.

Uh the furthest distance is Lake Livingston, because I know we had talked about uh here years ago.

There was uh gentleman that lived in the Dallas Fort Worth area that had a take-home vehicle.

Uh so that is gone, doesn't exist anymore.

And we heard the same uh we heard the same story.

So we went straight to the fire department and uh and asked them, and uh they said that situation no longer exists.

Okay.

Good deal.

Also uh looking at the incidents that they responded to, uh it looks like uh HPD, it's a little over nine incidents for every six months, so one and a half times a month just on an average.

Uh the fire department is about half that at 4.75.

Do we go back and look to see if there's any vehicles that never had a call in over the six months?

Uh we don't do it in fleet specifically because those are records tracked by the individual departments.

Okay.

But uh what what we've uh uh determined in running through this exercise, this this is a metric we should collect uh reliably and report, at least on an annual basis.

So we'll be working with the different departments to set up a uh reporting process that way we can uh respond when we're questioned uh with good accurate information, and as you're alluding to identify areas that perhaps there uh is no need for for the home storage vehicle.

Okay.

Councilwoman Peck.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Director, for the presentation.

Um during the Ernst and Young um efficiency studies, I can't remember.

Did they say that there were any changes that needed to be made to the take-home um vehicle policies?

We haven't seen any relative to uh uh at all.

Okay.

Are there any plans for any changes to the policy coming up?

Well, the big plan we've got is is uh as you know we're we're uh adopting the GPS system fleet-wide.

And uh and we're recording a lot of information now.

Um we've got uh GPS on uh I believe it's 770 of these take-home units.

So there still are some units without and then also the uh GPS units that uh that are operated by police, we don't see them, but but they can see them.

And so with that information, we can start to really hone in on uh where exactly everybody is when they provide their addresses, how often they're going in and out of that 30 mile radius, and uh and just uh uh we'd also be able to detect automatically with with reports the number of call-outs.

So, in other words, if somebody gets off at the end of the shift and they don't come back until morning, we know they weren't called out.

And so ultimately our goal is to use uh GPS to make our reporting uh uh much more reliable and and and correct, and then to also provide this information to our customer departments so that they can make decisions within their own group on uh on how to deploy these home storage vehicles.

Okay, so we're waiting for data basically to see if there's a lot of.

But we're getting better every day.

So you get more data every day as the installations uh number of installations increase.

With the GPS data, uh, does that also give you uh a flag if there's concerns about driving?

I know I was in logistics for 27 years and and we had some of that uh you know a number of years ago where um excessive speed would would be flagged.

Um now obviously with police and fire, maybe there's an emergency that would account for that, but at least it kind of gives you a flag that hey, maybe something's going on here we need to at least ask a question.

Absolutely.

So all of our base GPS uh units provide that feature, and we regularly receive uh exception reports on uh harsh braking, harsh acceleration, uh and then those are relayed.

Well, the departments can see that themselves as well.

They have uh uh full visibility into their uh uh folks, how they're driving.

But uh but we've we've learned quite a bit with that.

Now a few of the vehicles, specifically fire department and uh solid waste are also using cameras, and the cameras are picking up things as well that that are coming back to to the uh managers within those respective departments.

Okay.

So activity on the camera will flag that as well for the department heads?

Okay.

We've had a few it and uh we won't get too specific, but we've had a few point out that folks are drug dozing off or driving.

Right.

And the camera flags that and sends it back.

Okay.

Well, good.

Do we go and match that up with uh accident history?

I I don't know that we've met the.

I mean, if we have an accident, do we go back and look to see, hey, is was there also some braking issues and speeding?

What we have done is with uh the accident investigations is pulled in that data and that's the same.

Okay, perfect.

Yes, that's what I was asking.

Yeah.

Okay, good.

Uh I'm curious, has there been any revelations there that there have been uh uh well well I can say that uh uh I think that the fire department in particular is uh really looking to implement this system uh in a big way.

Okay.

We've had a lot of accidents, uh a lot of uh equipment losses through accidents, and of course that affects them with their asset availability.

So so they're they're really stepping forward and uh using this information to to work on bringing down the accident rate.

Well, that's great news.

I mean, obviously, accidents are uh a significant expense, and I mean in transportation we always consider them to be failure cost.

Uh obviously any failure cost you can eliminate uh improves the financials significantly.

So no, that's fantastic.

Okay.

Um it looks like we do not have any more questions.

Uh don't have anybody from the public with any questions either.

So once again, thank you for your presentation.

Uh truly appreciate it.

And uh let's see.

Oh, before we adjourn, please make note the next regularly scheduled government operations committee meeting will be on Wednesday, August 5th at 2 p.m.

Thank you very much.