The Road to Inefficiency

It's paved with government-issued cars.

IT BEGAN WITH an eagle-eyed auditor who, glancing at a garage maintained by Fairfax County's government for its huge fleet of official cars, noticed that too many of them spent their days parked, unused and apparently unneeded. The auditor rightly wondered whether the county bureaucracy -- 11,500 strong -- really warranted one vehicle per three employees. So it seemed perfectly rational when Fairfax decreed in 2004 that it would confiscate cars driven fewer than 4,500 miles a year -- a mere 18 miles per weekday over the course of a year, give or take.

Alas, the road to waste, inefficiency and bureaucratic scheming is paved with good intentions. On the one hand, the mileage minimum has helped prune the county's fleet by 167 vehicles, most of them in the year after the policy took effect. But, as reported by The Post's Lisa Rein, it has also prompted county workers and managers to devise ingenious methods to hang on to their county-owned cars -- by hook or by crook.

In some cases, managers have busied themselves coordinating vehicle swaps among their employees to ensure that vehicles hit the magic 4,500-mile target; in others, workers have been urged to drive more. (So much for lightening the load on the county's clogged roads or saving on gas.) A few brazen officials have even asserted that their vehicles' odometers must have malfunctioned.

Many public workers in Fairfax need county-issued cars, to transport surveying equipment or citizens with special needs or for many other legitimate uses. But e-mails unearthed by The Post also suggest that in some instances managers have done everything short of odometer-tampering to avoid parting with prized vehicles. "We need to think about scheduling with Tricia to use her vehicle for everything we can think of, so she won't lose it," wrote one supervisor.

In response to such chicanery, the county's Board of Supervisors voted to increase the minimum to 5,000 miles annually. We wonder if that won't just increase the incentive for subterfuge by a few unscrupulous managers. A better follow-up would be for the county to scrutinize the deployment of its remaining vehicles, tighten procedures governing their use and encourage more employees to use their own cars when possible (and claim reimbursement by mileage) -- a much more cost-efficient option.