It’s the case of the missing vehicles – or is it?

A quick glance at the headlines last week led one to believe the state government in California was either incredibly obtuse or limitlessly wealthy.

“Thousands of State-Owned Vehicles Missing,” screamed the headline from San Francisco ’s KPIX-TV Web site. Similar stories popped up in newspapers and blogs throughout the country.

If these reports were to be believed, a joint study between Caltrans and the State and Consumer Services Agency found that 30,000 of the state’s 70,000-vehicle fleet was missing.

But according to Matt Bender, spokesman for the California Department of General Services, the problem isn’t necessarily a boatload of missing vehicles – it’s poor record keeping.

“We aren’t missing vehicles, per se,” Bender said. “The problem is that we’ve never had an accurate count, so we’re trying to reconcile the limited information we’ve had in the past with a more thorough inventory of what we actually own.”

That information, Bender said, has come exclusively from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles – a source that has done little pruning of the data over the last century.

“That (DMV) data has been the source of that estimate that we’ve got 70,000 vehicles,” Bender said. “One of the interesting little quirks is that if you do a deep dive into the data, you find it includes some vehicles with model years dating back to the teens, literally.”

Closer inspection and common sense show that these outdated vehicles are no longer in use, Bender said.

“They show some California Highway Patrol vehicles with model years that are 25 years old,” Bender said. “We know how the CHP uses its vehicles, and there’s no way they’d still be driving 25-year-old vehicles.”

The new centralized approach to data maintenance is a change under the new administration.

“Here in California , we’ve historically let each department run its own fleet with relatively little oversight,” Bender said. “One of the changes that we’re making under the Schwarzenegger administration is to try and collect more centralized information about the overall state vehicle fleet.”

Ideally, Bender said, the state will eventually have a data warehouse containing an inventory of everything the state of California owns.

Now that the state’s 38,000 passenger vehicles have been inventoried, Bender said the state would begin looking into its heavy-vehicle fleet, which includes snow removal equipment, heavy haulers and construction equipment.