Cape Coral, FLA-- Cape Coral's City Auditor says the city needs a better policy to deal with take home cars.

That's because most of the miles put on the cars are from employees driving to and from work.

"In order to justify they need the car for business purposes, you should make a business case that the city benefits from taking the car home," City Councilman Bill Deile told CALL FOR ACTION.

Deile was glad to hear the city auditor would look over the take home car policy, "We wanted to see there were controls in place over our vehicles that are assigned on a regular basis or temporarily to employees to take home with them for business reasons."

The audit showed 26 employees allowed to take cars home-- not including police officers or firefighters.

Those cars racked up 90 thousand miles over a year driving to and from work costing the city 18 thousand dollars in fuel.

"When you see those cars being taken home being under utilized in terms of mileage most of that mileage is commuting you wonder why do we have car for that individual when he uses it mostly to come back and forth between work, " said Deile.

Auditors say the city was not taxing employees for those personal privileges a violation of federal law.

"We found a lot of things that can be improved. Management pretty much embraced that and said yes they would like to make those improvements. And they gave us written feedback on how they were going to do that," said City Auditor Dona Newman.

The city told the auditor they will amend their policies to:
*keep track of how often employees with take home cars are called out to work when off duty
*monitor personal use of vehicles to justify take home use
*and assign the department of human resources to make sure employees with take home privileges are taxed according to federal laws.

Councilman Deile's glad to see the changes.

"I drive to work you drive to work in your own car. If you have to use the car either be called out at odd hours or during the business day that's a different thing but the paperwork doesn't show that," said Deile.

The city issued CALL FOR ACTION this response:

"We think the take-home vehicle audit was an excellent tool to evaluate this program and find areas for improvement. We have addressed the recommendations provided in the audit, and we also are reviewing and modifying our administrative regulation for take-home vehicles. This was a very beneficial process for us."