LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department has 2,385 vehicles, including 674 that are taken home by employees and used for commuting.
The department has 3,592 employees, so just under one in five (or just under 19 percent) take vehicles home.
Of the 674 vehicles that are taken home, 94 are for Highway Police personnel who have a law-enforcement exemption from paying income taxes for the fringe benefit.
The rest, 580, pay the taxes, according to Randy Ort, Highway Department spokesman.
The agency has by far the most vehicles in state government. Arkansas as a whole owns 8,653 vehicles.
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Highway Commission Chairman Carl Rosenbaum of Little Rock said allowing hundreds of employees to commute in state vehicles is justified.
“We have 16,000 miles of roads to take care of,” Rosenbaum said. “Our employees that use those cars are subject to be called to duty 24 hours a day. If we made changes, we couldn’t serve the public.”
Ort said that as technology has lessened the need for manpower, the number of vehicles used for commuting has declined from 774 in 1998.
The department considers its employees who commute in state vehicles exempt from the part of Arkansas Code Annotated 19-4-903 that requires payment of15 cents a mile for commutes greater than 10 miles one-way.
That law allows exemptions if the employees are “required” to use state vehicles to commute. Ort said the agency considers each employee who commutes in a state vehicle as “required” to do so.
The statements by highway officials in support of their fleet echo comments from Gov. Mike Beebe’s spokesman, who said Wednesday that the governor sees no large-scale or isolated problems in the use of state vehicles.
Newspaper inquiries this month led to the discovery that most state elected constitutional officers haven’t paid income taxes on their personal use of state vehicles.
Land Commissioner Mark Wilcox has used two state vehicles: a 2006 Chevrolet Silverado on his farm and at his state office, and a 2008 Toyota Sequoia for his commute to Little Rock.
His spokesman, Mary Sue Whitelaw, said Thursday that Wilcox would pay income taxes for the personal use of state vehicles. She said he would pay for “past“ use but didn’t say how far back that would go.
She relayed a statement from Wilcox about his current use of state vehicles: “Regarding the truck, it is not in use at my home/farm for farming or personal travel. The truck in question is used when I am traveling from my home on land commissioner business when it is more feasible for me to leave from my home than the Capitol office, particularly if office business takes me northwest or northeast of Little Rock.”
Asked whether the state truck had been used in the past for work at Wilcox’s farm, Whitelaw said the truck “was not used in farm work,” something Wilcox has not said before. She said a personal truck was used for work at the farm.
Another agency that has a substantial taxpayer-funded fleet is the Arkansas State Police with 918 vehicles.
Of those, 620 are allowed for commuting, agency spokesman Bill Sadler said.
But about 530 are used by certified law enforcement officers who are exempt from paying income taxes on the vehicles’ use. Those include agency administrators, such as state police director Col. Winford Phillips, who drives a 2010 Dodge Charger.
Others receive exemptions from paying the income taxes because their jobs require them to travel around the state for inspections and maintenance, and they work out of their homes.
That leaves 27 who are paying the taxes for the use of state vehicles. They are civil employees who conduct driving tests around the state, Sadler said.
“We are evaluating that group of people to determine if they should be paying taxes,” Sadler said. “They have been paying taxes for quite a few years. Should these people be paying taxes? We are trying to look at IRS regulations and [state] regulations.”
Sadler said the driver’s-license test-givers have similar duties as the maintenance workers who travel about the state and have that exemption.
The remainder of state police vehicles are mostly assigned to divisions not to particular employees.
Sadler said he previously was assigned a state vehicle but gave it up about 10 years ago.
“Looking back, I can say it helped, but it became cumbersome to keep up with,” he said.
State regulations allow personal use only for commuting and incidental side trips, although the official policy is “official business only.”
Sadler said having a state car meant having to ask himself whether personal trips were justified, such as a “side trip to a grocery store, a stop at the dry cleaners, or if I meet my wife across town for an evening dinner.”
He said he keeps a bag packed in case he gets called away suddenly on state business. If something happens, like a recent shooting in West Memphis, he takes his personal vehicle, hitches a ride with an officer or takes an agency pool vehicle, he said.
Of the 580 non-law-enforcement Highway Department vehicles that are used for commuting, 445 are used by maintenance and construction crew members in the 10 district shops.
The rest - 135 - are used by administrators and central staff members. The agency director, Dan Flowers, drives a 2010 Chevrolet Suburban.
“The eligibility to use a [state] car to commute is based on several factors, first of all, if you are on call 24 hours a day, then you have a car assigned, and you are taxed for it,” Ort said.
Whether employees in districts are allowed to commute in state vehicles is determined by the locations of construction projects and the roles that the employees play in particular projects. Because of that, the number of commuting employees fluctuates, he said.
For example, he said, construction in West Memphis is near the district shop where employees would be driving anyway so fewer employees there are allowed to commute in state vehicles.
The agency’s 2,385 vehicles include 795 dump trucks and 273 other types of trucks.
He said the agency allows certain interns to take vehicles home, depending on their jobs.
Ort drives a 2008 Chevrolet Impala. He said he discovered that he has actually paid more taxes on its use than required. He said the agency automatically counts extra income on 10 days per two-week pay period for having a state vehicle.
The Internal Revenue Service requires that commutes be calculated as $1.50 in taxable income for each one-way trip.
“I didn’t realize that if I leave my house and go to Fayetteville for a meeting and come back to my house that I didn’t commute that day, and I can exclude that day,” Ort said.
Ort said many employees keep tools in their state vehicles in case the workers are called out to work in the middle of the night.
As for the need for administrators to have state vehicles, Ort used himself as an example.
“If I get called out, I don’t necessarily have specialized equipment,” he said. “If I get called out, most of the time it’ll be a bad-weather situation. If I go out in my personal vehicle, I’m personally liable.”
He said administrators have department radios in their cars to help them keep track of “what’s going on.”
Ort said he “can’t quantify” how many times agency administrators are called out to work in the middle of the night.
“But how many times does it take to justify it?” he said. “You can call it a perk, a benefit, or a need, but we pay taxes on it.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/30/2010