Montgomery County is still paying huge sums of money for a car-sharing program that almost no one is using.
The county paid Enterprise Rent-A-Car $27,500 in July to rent 25 hybrid cars that were used a total of 79.5 hours — a rate of essentially $346 an hour. Only 11 county employees used the service that month, county records show.
Officials said in June that they hoped the car-sharing program would become more popular after the county reassigned 54 “under-utilized” county-owned cars from various departments by July 1, forcing employees to use the car-sharing program.
But that hope never materialized, and the use of the program dropped from 206.5 hours in June to fewer than 80 in July. County employees have used the cars for about 55 hours so far this month.
Millie Souders, chief of the county’s fleet management service, said the county is cutting the number of available cars back to 20 and will issue a competitive bid in the fall for a new car-sharing agreement that will be less costly.
She said the county wasn’t able to accept competitive bids for the pilot program, and instead amended an existing contract with Enterprise so that the program started as quickly as county leaders wanted.
The county pays Enterprise an all-inclusive $1,100 a month per car, regardless of how much — or little — they are used. A comparable private car-share service, such as Zipcar, costs Montgomery County residents about $10 an hour to use.
The Examiner first reported on the rocky start of the pilot program, which was used only three times for fewer than 10 hours during the first two-and-a-half months it was available to county employees.
Overall, the program has been used for just over 700 hours since it started in January, at a total cost of roughly $220,000.
Still, officials said the car-share program allowed them save money by not having to buy 20 new cars and redeploying others, which they said saved the county $500,000.
“Underutilized vehicles were redistributed to other departments resulting in significant cost avoidance,” said David Dise, director of the county Department of General Services.
The District’s government recently expanded a similar pilot car-sharing program that started in October, and officials there said they have been able to trim 360 vehicles from its fleet and expect savings of $6.6 million over five years.
