City of Ottawa demanded $8,640 for data on cost of take-home trucks

When CBC News discovered employees with just one branch of the City of Ottawa's public works department logged more than62,000 kilometres travelling between work and home in city vehicles theequivalent of circling the equatorone and a half times wewanted to know how much that was costing taxpayers.

• City of Ottawa workers drive fleet vehicles home on taxpayers' dime

First, getting that answer was going to cost us. A lot.

The searchbegan when we were made aware of a City of Ottawa truck parked at a home in Alcove, Que., more than 40 kilometres north of the city.

The city told us the employee driving the truck hadapproval to take it home because the individual was on call with the parks, buildings and grounds services branch.

We decided to file a municipal freedom of information request to find out more. Narrowing our search to the same branch, we asked for five years' worth of data on the following:

• How many employees take home city vehicles?
• How far do they drive toand from work?
• How much does it cost the city in gas?
• How much does the city spend maintaining these vehicles?

No central database

The estimate to supply the information came in at$8,640, or230 hours of searching at $30 per hour.

An analyst with the city's access and privacy department explained the city doesn't collect the information we soughtin anycentralized database.

Supervisors do track on-call workers' mileage, and employees must submit monthly taxable benefit forms for the travel. Nevertheless the city told us collecting and calculating the information would be a monumental task, even for one branch of one department.

So CBC narrowed therequest to oneyearof dataat a much more reasonable cost of$120. Butthe city was unable to provide a price tag for the practice of allowing on-call parks workers to drive fleet vehicles home.

"The city pays for the gas for its work vehicles," wrote Laila Gibbons, manager of parks, buildings and grounds services in an email to CBC. "The cost may vary from week to week as the on-call supervisors rotate their schedule."

'Most cost-effective'

The city was unable to tell us how much it costs to maintain these vehicles, or the cost of wear and tear on the vehicles some employees are allowed to drive home.

The city maintains that allowing on-call employees to drive fleetvehicles home isthe cheapest and fastest wayto respond to emergencies after hours.

"The city looks at this on a continual basis.Do we need to have all of these people on call?Is it better to have them use their own vehicles or use city vehicles?" said city treasurerMarianSimulik.

"But ultimately this is the most cost effective [practise],from our perspective."

• City of Ottawa trucks by the numbers