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Supervisors back tighter telematics reporting after BLA finds speeding, long‑term rentals in city fleet
Summary
The committee advanced amendments to require departments to report on take‑home and long‑term rental vehicle use after a Budget & Legislative Analyst review found thousands of speeding incidents, 55 rentals exceeding a year and an estimated $10.5 million in annual costs; the measure was amended and forwarded to the full Board.
The Land Use and Transportation Committee voted to advance amended legislation intended to tighten oversight of the city's vehicle telematics program after a Budget and Legislative Analyst (BLA) report identified repeated speeding incidents and long‑term rentals in the municipal fleet. The committee adopted President Norman Yee's amendments and directed the city attorney to draft additional rental language before the full Board reviews the measure.
The BLA presented a follow‑up analysis on the telematics program that monitors location, speed and vehicle diagnostics. "Our information from August 2019 showed that 52% of the fleet had the technology installed," said Julian Metcalfe, principal analyst at the Budget and Legislative Analyst's Office. Metcalfe said his cleaned 13‑month dataset (Sept. 2018–Sept. 2019) identified 2,619 individual vehicles with at least one speeding incident of more than 10 miles per hour over the posted limit and that 768 vehicles reported more than 50 incidents in the same period. He added that 16.3 percent of the speeding incidents were 20–29 mph over the limit.
The report also flagged city rentals as a governance gap. "We found 55 instances where cars were rented for more than 1 year," Metcalfe said, adding the long rentals were concentrated in the Police Department and the Public Utilities Commission and that some rented vehicles had no department listed. The BLA estimated that combined factors — claims, repairs, underutilization and unnecessary purchases — cost the city about $10,500,000 annually.
City Administrator Naomi Kelly defended the existing program but agreed more centralized oversight is needed. "We partnered with city departments and vendors to install and maintain 4,198 telematics devices," Kelly said, noting monthly dashboards and that the city had retired more than 300 underutilized vehicles since February 2018. She said reported high‑speed incidents fell by roughly two‑thirds after the system was launched.
Committee members pressed staff for department‑level detail on the long‑term rentals and asked the BLA to check with the Controller's Office to identify records that Enterprise Rent‑A‑Car supplied without a department label. Supervisor Dean Preston said he will seek a refined table from the BLA showing which departments were responsible for long rentals and the price points involved.
The committee voted to adopt the sponsor's amendments, directed the city attorney to craft rental‑specific language and duplicated the file as twice amended for further consideration. The committee's roll calls on the motions were recorded on the transcript as ayes by Supervisors Preston, Safaei and Peskin; the matter will be considered by the full Board.
