Cumulative costs for one car after four years:
Enterprise: $52,800
Zipcar: $89,200
County-owned Prius: $45,523
Source: CountyStat report
Montgomery County is taking a hard look at a pilot car-sharing program that costs taxpayers essentially $227 per hour of use.
The county paid Enterprise Rent-a-Car close to $300,000 from January through October so that employees could rent between 20 to 30 hybrid cars or sport utility vehicles by the hour instead of relying on underused county-owned cars, county records show. But the rented cars were used an average of only 130 hours a month while the county paid an all-inclusive rate of $1,100 a month per car, records show.
Now the county’s oversight program, CountyStat, has started taking a look at why the program has been poorly used.
CountyStat’s manager, Chris Cihlar, said the car-sharing program wasn’t properly vetted before it started and is recommending the county “clearly outline goals, expectations and metrics of performance” before implementing other programs.
The county needs to “make sure that we have really done the homework that needs to be done” before starting a program like the car-sharing plan, Cihlar said.
CountyStat records show that buying and maintaining a hybrid car is $7,000 cheaper than renting from Enterprise after four years.
Cihlar added that part of the reason the car-sharing program did not attract many users is because the county did not take away as many county-owned cars from employees as it should have.
The Department of General Services estimated that it needed to take 50 county-owned cars away from various departments to make the car-sharing program economically feasible, but the county has removed only 17 cars as of last week, county records show.
The Examiner first reported that the car-sharing program had a rough start, in which only three employees used the program for less than 10 hours in its first three months. The program has become more popular in recent months, with 308 hours of use in September and nearly 400 hours of use in October.
A county spokeswoman said she did not know whether the car-sharing program had been renewed for another year. County officials said previously that the car sharing allowed them save money by not having to buy 20 new cars and redeploying others, which they said saved the county $500,000.
County Executive Ike Leggett included the car-sharing program in a list of programs the federal government could emulate in a letter to the White House.
