New Orleans City Hall — Approximate City Government Oversight Site
New Orleans is paying $1.4 million a year for fleet-tracking software, but nearly 40 percent of the city’s 2,577 vehicles still don’t have it installed, according to a new watchdog report. The gap includes roughly 64 percent of the vehicles without the software being police department vehicles, leaving a wide swath of public vehicles unmonitored even as the city has invested heavily in GPS and maintenance-alert technology meant to keep tabs on them.
The findings come from the New Orleans Office of Inspector General, which reported that the city’s fleet-tracking software is installed in just 62 percent of municipal vehicles, as detailed by WDSU. Watchdogs say privacy concerns have kept the software off nearly 40 percent of the fleet, and the city has effectively wasted close to $500,000 on unused software licenses as a result, per the OIG’s estimate. The technology is capable of tracking vehicle locations by GPS, monitoring driver behavior, and flagging maintenance needs — features the city is paying for but not fully using…