City may adopt policy on take-home vehicles

By Charles Oliver

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series. The first part, which appeared in The Daily Citizen last Sunday, focused on vehicles assigned to employees of the Dalton Police Department and the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office.



Twenty-three Dalton city employees, not counting employees in the police department, have vehicles they are allowed to take home with them each night. But the city doesn’t have a written policy regarding their use.

Mayor David Pennington says that’s going to change.

“We have looked at that, as well as quite a few other areas where there are no existing policies in place. We’ve got Cindy Jackson, our chief financial officer, coming up with several policies that we are going to be taking action on over the next four to six weeks,” said Pennington. “It involves personnel, hiring practices, raises, use of city vehicles, things like that. For some reason, there haven’t been citywide policies on a lot of things.”

Policies have been developed by each department.

Pennington says the city is currently gathering data on how much the assigned vehicles cost, as well as information on how many assigned vehicles employees in cities of comparable size to Dalton have and the policies those cities have on city vehicles.

According to data provided by the city, the Dalton-Whitfield Regional Solid Waste Management Authority has the largest number of city employees with take-home vehicles. The authority is an independent agency, but it leases employees from the city. The authority has eight employees, out of 39 full-time employees, with assigned vehicles.

Executive director Norman Barashick says vehicles are provided to “on call” employees during their off hours.

“Some of them do get called back on a regular basis. Some of them it could be weekly. Some of them it could be monthly,” he said.

Barashick says the agency hasn’t looked at how much it would cost to pay employees’ mileage when they have to come in after hours vs. providing a car.

He says employees are not supposed to have non-employees in the cars, which are marked with the landfill’s logo, nor to use them for personal business.

The city’s public works department has five employees with assigned vehicles.

Public works director Benny Dunn says the vehicles are assigned to employees who are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“One of our guys, for instance, is over our traffic division, so he’s subject to be called out for any kind of traffic signal problems or other traffic-related problems. If we had a wreck and had to set up a detour, he’d need to be able to come in and respond quickly,” Dunn said.

Dunn said he couldn’t say exactly how often these employees are called in.

“It’s all based on emergency situations,” he said.

Dunn said public works employees are not supposed to use city vehicles for personal trips.

“No family members should be riding in them,” he said.

But Dunn says the ability to provide an assigned vehicle makes it easier for the city to attract employees.

“What a lot of these guys did, when they were hired into these positions or promoted into these positions, instead of getting a higher salary, they were given a little lower pay scale with the understanding they would have a vehicle to drive home,” he said.

Pennington said he isn’t necessarily opposed to providing vehicles to city employees.

“We hear that argument, and we know we have to be competitive one way or another. I understand the rationale behind that. But there also have to be the rationales that it is cost-effective and we are doing it the most efficient way possible,” he said.



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Assigned vehicles by department for the city of Dalton

Fire Department 2

Municipal Court 1

Police Department 74

Public Works 5

Parks & Recreation 4

Building Inspection 3

Solid Waste Authority 8