How Many Vehicles Does Michigan Own?
Well, well, well just the other week I reported on the fact that Michigan is looking for more “revenue” to help fund more infrastructure improvements. That by the way is spending on top of the $1.2 billion dollars a year they raised taxes on gasoline and automobile fees.
Well we all know what revenue is, that is cash brought into a business with the sale of their goods or services. When any politician starts talking about increasing “revenue” to the state of Michigan I think it is fair to them to expect they actually know the meaning of the word, don’t you.
Well I just might have found a source of revenue for our great state of Michigan and that is the sale of vehicles.
The Michigan Capitol Confidential news site is informing us that Michigan, and that means you, owns a vehicle for every 3.4 state employees. Sounds a bit excessive to me.
Michigan has been making some progress in reducing the size of our state workforce. In 2006 we had 52,259 state employees, as of 2017 the number has decreased to 46,827 and that is approximately a 10% decrease. The interesting statistic is that our fleet of state-owned vehicles has risen from 10,594 to 13,549 which is a 28% increase.
To be fair you must know that those numbers do include vehicles provided to state law enforcement officials, including our State Police troopers.
The numbers stated above comes directly from the state of Michigan’s own annual financial report.
Caleb Buhs from Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management and Budget was quoted in the article stating:
There are a number of factors that play into the increase in vehicles, but it mostly comes down to an increase in mobile workers, business decisions by the departments to improve service delivery and a desire to save costs on personal mileage reimbursement…The improvements in technology have allowed more employees to conduct their business away from a brick-and-mortar location, as was required in the past. This gives departments an opportunity to improve their business models and offer more services in the field. There is also a point in which the state realizes savings from providing an assigned vehicle to employees when they are seeking reimbursement for personal miles driven.
OK, but it still sounds like quite a bit of vehicles and our politicians say they are looking for revenue to help Governor Whitmer’s desire to fund another approximately $2.5 billion in infrastructure each year.
We need to find the “revenue” somewhere, don’t we?
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