{
  "id": "1996-december-take-our-money-please",
  "slug": "1996-december-take-our-money-please",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1996-december-take-our-money-please.html",
  "year": 1996,
  "month": "December",
  "monthNum": 12,
  "headline": "Take our money - please",
  "kicker": "CAR Trips: First Ventures",
  "author_name": "Griff Palmer",
  "author_title": "database editor",
  "affiliation": "The Oklahoman",
  "summary": "An investigation by The Oklahoman reveals that Oklahoma City's police fleet has significantly higher repair costs and mileage than comparable cities, with some vehicles accumulating over 200,000 miles and repair bills exceeding $50,000. Reporter Griffin Palmer explains the data analysis methodology used to benchmark the city's fleet performance against national standards.",
  "keywords": [
    "fleet",
    "maintenance",
    "benchmarking"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Data & Databases",
    "Government & Politics",
    "Investigative Methods"
  ],
  "technologies": [],
  "full_text": "Take our money - please\n\nBy Griff Palmer The Oklahoman\n\nGriff Palmer attended Advanced Bootcamp in May.\n\nUntil he was contacted by a reporter from The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City police officer Mike Williams didn't know repair and fuel bills on his police cruiser topped on a car that originally cost $12,250.\n\nThe car has been in the shop for maintenance or repairs nearly every two weeks since 1992, The Oklahoman reported. Yet Williams told the newspaper his cruiser is not the worst of the bunch.\n\nIt's not unusual among the city's fleet of 600-plus cars to see repair and operating costs topping $50,000, The Oklahoman found. The average mileage for Oklahoma City's police fleet is just under 100,000 miles; 303 police vehicles have logged more than 100,000 miles; 85 cars have more than 150,000 miles; and 12 cars have more than 200,000 miles.\n\nThis compares with eight out of 10 cities surveyed by the American Fleet Managers Association, which reported average mileage per police car as 69,000 miles or less.\n\nReporters Steve Lackmeyer, Penny Owen, and Diane Plumberg and database editor Griffin Palmer got at the heart of the story with data. Palmer tells how:\n\nWe worked from a cumulative database that reflected figures for the lifetime of each car. If I had more time, I'd have liked to have gotten the database broken out by year. The National Association of Fleet Managers publishes a booklet titled \"Benchmarking for Quality in Public Service Fleets.\" NAFA surveyed 90 public fleets, ranging in size from 250 units to 10,000-plus units. It analyzed a variety of service/performance measures, plotting distributions of fleet administrators' responses for each measure.\n\nOn many of the measures, figures for police cars are plotted separately from those for other fleet sedans.\n\nMany of those distributions are based on annual figures, so having local fleet figures broken out by year allows a reporter to compare the local fleet against NAFA survey results. In addition to plotting the distribution curve, NAFA charts the median value for each measure, along with the low 20th percentile and the high 20th percentile.\n\nAmong the many measures in the NAFA book are average number of miles vehicles are driven each year; average number of miles vehicles have been driven since they were put into service; yearly maintenance and repair costs per mile; fuel cost per mile; fuel mileage; total cost per mile; downtime rate; miles between breakdowns; miles per mechanic hour.\n\nTricky measures\n\nCapital cost is one of the trickier measures. NAFA defines capital cost as the vehicle's purchase price minus its projected disposal value, divided by the number of miles it is projected to be driven during its retention period.\n\nIn order to compare against the NAFA benchmarks, a reporter must have those figures for the local fleet.\n\nWe found the downtime rate to be problematic because of the way Oklahoma City's Equipment Services Division records its data. City officials said they record time out of service as the number of hours between the time a work order is written and the time it is closed off the books. However, they said a car is often actually put back onto the street long before the work order is cleared off the books, rendering the downtime figures meaningless.\n\nA great many municipal fleet maintenance services operate on enterprise accounting. They receive no general fund appropriations, and have to generate their operating revenue from chargebacks to the city agencies whose vehicles they service. They are constantly being scrutinized for the fairness of their charges, and to make sure the work cannot be done for less by commercial vendors. Thus, most fleet maintenance operations tend to keep good, detailed service data.\n\nOklahoma City's cumulative maintenance records for each police cruiser included VIN number, police unit number, original cost, fuel cost, fuel quantity, number of breakdowns, parts costs, accident repair costs, labor costs, labor hours, total work orders written, total mileage and total maintenance and operating costs.\n\nGriffin Palmer can be reached at palmer@qns.com",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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      "slug": "1996-december-national-association-of-fleet-managers-notice",
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  ],
  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1996-december-take-our-money-please.html",
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}