Daily journal, 09-19-11

September 20, 2011

Today we had another round of discussions about the county’s take home
vehicles. The proliferation of these vehicles and the county’s
inability to properly manage the system has been a running problem for
decades. In 1992 and again in 2001 there were major council initiated
investigations into the problem, finding each time that the county was
failing to collect payments from many employees for their commutes.
The estimate at the time was over $200,000 in lost collections per
year. This year at my request the T/E committee reviewed take home
vehicles again and found the same situation occurring! The
administration has cut the number of take home assigned vehicles by
14% in response and has instituted new procedures to reclaim money
owed to the county going forward. Whether this can really work given
the repeated failures over the years is something I am considering
carefully.

After the busy day of council work I went to a dinner organized by
Bethesda Green at Chef Tony’s focusing on “farm to table” issues.
With 40% of county land set aside for agricultural uses, we actually
have very little “table food” farming. It’s something we need to
encourage.