By Rachel O’Brien
Deputy Policy Editor, OpenTheBooks.com
Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County employees drove 722 government-paid-for vehicles in 2021, up from 646 vehicles in 2020. The database did not contain a breakdown of personal miles vs. business miles driven by employees.
With almost 10,000 employees, Metro Nashville provided the take-home vehicles to departments last year, including more than 600 for police and park police.
Other departments that got vehicles were fire, water department, health, transportation, district attorney general and office of emergency management, according to information that OpenTheBooks.com collected through an open records request.
In 2021, police drive 583 vehicles, water department drove 47, fire drove 32, park police drove 19, health and DOT drove 12 each, office of emergency management drove nine, district attorney general drove five and park maintenance drove one.
Each vehicle tracked its mileage, which in 2021 ranged from 2 miles driven by a water department employee to 29,220 miles driven by a health department employee.
However, we found that 117 vehicles were driven less than 5,000 miles on the year; 22 vehicles were driven less than 2,000 miles; and six vehicles were driven between 300 miles and 999 miles.
On average, employees drove vehicles 10,116 miles in 2021, with an average of 758 gallons of fuel used.
So, even though the city added 76 vehicles into inventory, each vehicle was driven 1,000 miles less, on average, than in 2020.
We also found that even though the city is adding vehicles to its fleet, the miles per gallon was the exact same as 2020: 13.35.
Furthermore, a good portion of the city vehicle fleet is old – 203 vehicles are more than 10 years old with the oldest vehicle nearly 20 years old.
In 2020, the fewest miles were 95 driven by a police employee and the highest were 30,524 miles also driven by a police employee.
On average, employees drove vehicles 11,043 miles in 2020, with an average of 825 gallons of fuel used.
Vehicles made between 2003 and 2009 only accounted for 48 of the total across both years, while there were 27 made in 2010, 26 in 2011, 59 in 2012, 41 in 2013, 56 in 2014, 20 in 2015, 34 in 2016, 49 in 2017.
There were 249 vehicles from in 2018, 19 from 2019, 59 made in 2020 and 56 in 2021.