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.
Much of that resistance reportedly traces back to employees and police unions, who have raised concerns about the software being used to track workers' movements rather than just vehicles. The New Orleans Police Department does have its own way of tracking officers, but those systems are tied to individual officers rather than the city-owned vehicles they drive, according to the report covered by WDSU. That distinction has left a large share of patrol cars and other police vehicles outside the reach of the citywide tracking platform even as the rest of the fleet gets monitored.
A Sprawling Fleet Built for Centralized Tracking
The scale of the oversight challenge is considerable. The City of New Orleans relies on Samsara's Connected Operations platform across 41 municipal departments to monitor roughly 2,630 city vehicles and public assets, according to Samsara, a system adopted to replace fragmented tracking methods like magnetic boards and radio GPS that departments previously used on their own. The city also has Chief Administrative Officer Policy Memorandum No. 5(R), which addresses administrative vehicle policy and take-home vehicles, per the City of New Orleans.
The Equipment Maintenance Division has made some fixes already. It developed a fleet management information system that improved controls over fuel cards and PINs and established a new vehicle allocation method, the division told WDSU. But staff reportedly did not consistently enter maintenance and repair data into that system, undercutting the very oversight tool meant to close the gaps the inspector general flagged.
An Auction Vendor Hired Without Competitive Bidding
The audit also scrutinized how the division handled the sale of surplus vehicles. In late 2025, the Equipment Maintenance Division hired J.J. Kane Auctions through a micro-purchase process, a method allowed under city policy after the division obtained three quotes. But the contract itself was not competitively bid, the OIG reported, even though New Orleans paid no seller's fee for the arrangement — buyers instead paid a 17 percent commission to the auction house.
In two auctions held in early 2026, J.J. Kane sold 84 city vehicles for $169,625, collecting about $28,836 in buyer fees. The inspector general estimated the auction house could earn roughly $93,000 from similar vehicle sales in 2026, a sum the OIG says far exceeds what a low-dollar micro-purchase arrangement should have allowed without a more competitive process. The watchdog recommended the city use competitive bids whenever a vendor's estimated earnings significantly exceed the purchasing threshold, even when the direct cost to the city itself appears low.
Inspector General Cites $80 Million in Assets at Stake
The OIG's review covered Equipment Maintenance Division operations from January through December 2024, while also discussing policies the division had implemented as recently as March 2026. The division accepted two of the OIG's three recommendations and said work had already begun to address some of the findings.
Inspector General Edward Michel framed the stakes in blunt terms, saying the city's vehicle fleet represents nearly $80 million in essential public assets. Stronger management and oversight, he said, are needed to protect those assets and reduce the risk of fraud, waste and abuse.
The report lands amid a broader run of city accountability findings. In February, the city had placed 150 decommissioned municipal vehicles up for public auction to clear aging assets and generate revenue, according to WVUE FOX 8. And this past August, a joint investigation by the inspector general's office and Louisiana State Police led to a felony arrest of an NOPD officer accused of logging false work locations to collect more than $111,000 in fraudulent overtime, a case Hoodline previously reported. In the wake of that scandal, the police department cut its overtime spending by 45 percent in the first half of 2026, from $18 million down to $9.6 million, according to OFFICER Magazine.
Watchdog scrutiny of the city's fleet operations isn't new: an administrative-fleet report dates to December 2008.
