E-Edition
Sign up for email newsletters
Sign up for email newsletters
E-Edition
TRENDING:
KINGSTON, N.Y. — Included in the new contract between the county and its largest employee labor union is a new policy governing the use of take-home vehicles by the county’s Department of Public Works employees.
The agreement allows those employees who currently have a take-home vehicle to keep them — provided they remain in a position in which a take-home vehicle is assigned. But it gives the county “sole discretion” over the future assignment of such vehicles.
Legislator Joseph Maloney, who in 2023 first raised the issue of take-home vehicles, called the policy a “back-door policy” that eliminates the ability for legislators to have oversight over employee vehicle use.
“It eliminates the possibility for any legislator to ever be able to talk about it again,’ said Maloney, R-Saugerties. “This language was put in there just to take away our ability to ever have any oversight over take-home vehicles.”
The issue of take-home vehicles came to a head in 2013 when the head of the Department of Public Works was spotted tooling around in a county-assigned Ford Mustang Mach-E.
In September 2013, Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger’s office said there are 98 take-home vehicles assigned to employees, including two assigned to employees in the county’s Building and Grounds Department, 25 to employees in the Highway Department, four to the Department of Social Services, 10 to the District Attorney’s Office, nine to the Department of Emergency Management, three to the Safety Department, and 45 to the Sheriff’s Office.
Maloney’s questioning of the policy prompted former Legislature Chairwoman Tracey Bartels to appoint a Special Fleet Management Review Committee to look at the county’s take-home vehicle usage.
In a telephone interview, Maloney said that the committee recommended the county, “for the most part,” eliminate take-home vehicles.
None of the recommendations, he said, were incorporated in the new policy.
Howard Baul, the labor relations specialist representing CSEA workers, said the take-home vehicles for public works employees have been a “decades-old benefit” that the county couldn’t unilaterally revoke.
“We would have filed legal actions if they were to do that,” Baul said in a telephone interview.
He said the negotiated policy “keeps in place the folks that have vehicles right now.”
As those employees leave their positions, he said, the county will have full discretion to decide whether to assign take-home vehicles to the new employees.
The contractual agreement also establishes residency and reporting requirements for employees assigned take-home vehicles.
The four-year contract, which was ratified last month by the employees’ union, will go to the full Legislature for a vote on Dec. 3.
Copyright © 2025 MediaNews Group
