The Town Government With More Cars Than Employees

by: warner todd huston | published: 09 19, 2011

There is a town in Tennessee whose government owns more cars than they even have employees to drive them. This is the sort of excess that every anti-big government activist points to in order to show the bacchanalia of spending to which governments in our fair country are prone.

The Times Free Press of Chattanooga, Tennessee reports that the city of East Ridge made a startling discovery. Town fathers realized the town government owns 149 vehicles. Turns out they only 119 employees. They do indeed have more cars than employees.

Two months ago City Councilman Jim Bethune noted that the city seemed to have an awful lot of cars sitting around that are never used. So, they decided to sell a few to help make up for budget shortfalls and to get rid of the needless vehicles.

City officials made the surprising discover when they finally rounded up all the city's vehicles. Then they got another surprise. The town had been so slipshod in records keeping that they couldn't even locate the titles for 11 of those cars. The city had to pay the state $121 to file for each missing title.

Then the city found ten titles for cars it could not even find. They had no idea what happened to them. There was an additional 30 vehicles with titles they hadn't received yet (they were recently purchased) or they didn't have because they were donated cars. That made their ownership "questionable" and unable to be sold.

Naturally all these cars are insured -- and some of them aren't even operable -- at a cost of $42,471 annually to the taxpayers.

Now, imagine this scenario repeated in nearly every town, city, county, state and federal office across the country. Imagine the waste, confusion, slipshod records, and downright neglect that car pools nation wide are mired in. Imagine how much money could be saved if every town cleaned up their motor pool mess and took pains to stop it from happening again?

But isn't this just the sort of waste that we all know full well that government perpetrates? There is no accountability. They don't have any imputes to do the right thing because no one is holding their feet to the fire. They can waste all the tax money they want, they feel. Who's to stop them?

It may seem like a small thing, but if every government did this the savings to the taxpayers collectively would surely reach into the billions. And this is just one small area of waste. There is office rentals, furniture and office equipment, planes, road working equipment, governments own all sorts of things they have no use for and we are footing the bill.

Then there's land and real estate. How it ever came to be that governments own more land than actual citizens do is a crime. Billions of acres of land in this country are owned by government instead of being in the hands of private citizens where said acreage could be put to productive use.

This is not to even mention the may thousands of useless employees and their expensive benefits packages that governments pointlessly employ.

Like I said. We the taxpayers are footing the bill for all this waste. And it grows by millions every single day.

(H/T Adrienne Royer)

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