How Sacramento County saves $50 per vehicle on smog checks with Geotab

Sacramento County used Geotab's State of California contract to cut through procurement bureaucracy, deploy telematics with zero hardware or installation cost, and build a data-driven fleet management program that is now expanding across county departments.

When Keith Leech, Chief of Fleet Division and Parking Enterprise at Sacramento County, set out to improve driver safety across the county fleet, he ran into the same walls government fleet managers face everywhere: department silos, budget scrutiny, drawn-out approval cycles, and a board of supervisors that needed convincing. His existing telematics platform was making it worse — inaccurate speed and location data meant his team couldn't reliably coach drivers, which was the entire point. 

What Sacramento County needed wasn't just better technology. It needed a path to get that technology approved, funded, and deployed.

The challenge: inaccurate data, department silos, and procurement friction 

The existing telematics system compounded the problem. The speed and location data it produced was unreliable — and without accurate data, there was no foundation for a driver safety coaching program. The team knew they needed a new solution, but justifying the switch meant building a business case strong enough to survive a board of supervisors review.

Government fleet managers don't just manage vehicles — they manage stakeholders. For Sacramento County, every procurement decision touched multiple departments, each with its own budget, priorities, and appetite for change. The Fleet Division didn't have regulatory authority to mandate a county-wide telematics policy. If other departments wanted GPS tracking, they had to be persuaded, not directed.

"It's really contingent on our ability to sell the ROI to our other departments. It's not a top-down approach. I don't have the regulatory authority for a fleet management policy coming out of the county board of supervisors or county executives. Essentially, if the department wants to pay for it and implement GPS telematics across the board, we have to facilitate that." — Keith Leech

The solution: procurement simplified through California's state telematics contract

Sacramento County found its answer in Geotab — not just for the quality of the data, but for the credibility of a vendor already trusted by the State of California and the Federal Government, and for how easy that made the procurement process itself.

In 2019, Geotab was awarded a single-source Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) to supply the State of California and participating local government agency fleets with its telematics solution. That contract became Sacramento County's shortcut through the procurement maze.

"Just knowing the State of California and the Federal Government is using Geotab, in my mind, was an easy justification to make when it came to choosing Geotab telematics. Utilizing the State contract was so easy. When we took our recommendation to our board of supervisors for approval, there were literally no challenges — everyone accepted it." — Keith Leech

Joe Trujillo, Fleet Manager at Sacramento County, adds that the cost structure removed another common objection entirely: "The fact that Geotab provided the hardware and installation at no cost definitely helps us when pitching the solution to other departments."

Reliable data for driver safety and fleet optimization

Where the previous system produced inaccurate speed and location data, Geotab delivered real-time, reliable information accessible through dashboards available to every manager at any time. The team could now build a legitimate driver safety coaching program — and go further, using utilization data to identify underused vehicles and rightsize the fleet. 

Before Geotab, decisions about vehicle utilization relied primarily on mileage. Mileage alone doesn't reflect how a vehicle is actually used. With Geotab, Sacramento County could track total trips, giving fleet managers a far more accurate picture of true vehicle use.

Smog check automation through California's BAR CTP partnership

Geotab is an approved participant in the California Bureau of Automotive Repair's (BAR) Continuous Testing Program (CTP) — a program that allows telematics data pulled directly from vehicles to replace mandatory in-person smog checks, which the State of California requires every two years.

For Sacramento County, this delivered two immediate benefits:

• Eliminated full-day downtime: vehicles submitted to in-person smog checks were previously out of service for an entire day.
• Saved $50 per vehicle: the cost of each traditional smog check, now avoided entirely.

Zero upfront cost for hardware and installation

Under the State of California BPA, Sacramento County received Geotab hardware and installation at no upfront cost. For a fleet division that operates without top-down budget authority and depends on convincing individual departments to fund their own telematics programs, this removed the single biggest barrier to adoption.

Cross-department expansion driven by results

The rollout began with the Department of General Services. Word spread quickly.

"We started out with just our own department, and we would receive calls from Animal Care, Water Resources, and others who were hearing good things. We shared our positive experience with these other teams and explained the benefits of the Geotab solution, and now we're working with them to implement it on their teams." — Joe Trujillo

The results: reliable data for decision-making, rightsized vehicles, and departments that come asking

With accurate telematics data in hand, Sacramento County's Fleet Division could do what it had set out to do from the beginning: coach drivers, reduce risk, and make decisions based on evidence instead of assumption.

• Driver safety program activated: Reliable speed and location data gave fleet managers the foundation to coach drivers and enforce safety standards for the first time.
• Fleet rightsized: Trip-based utilization data helped one division confidently reduce several vehicles from service, a decision mileage data alone could never have supported.
• Diagnostic time reduced: Real-time vehicle monitoring cuts down troubleshooting time when vehicles enter the shop, and helps the team identify potential failures before they become costly breakdowns.
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) decisions improved: Fleet managers now have data-driven input for decisions on utilization, maintenance, and fleet optimization across departments.

"Geotab provides us with reliable data to help us make data-driven decisions on TCO and utilization, with the goal of best business practices in fleet management. It helps us educate our internal departments where there's opportunities for not only operational savings through utilization improvements, but also through improving our fleet's sustainability by implementing renewable fuels and electrification of the future." — Keith Leech, Chief, Fleet Division and Parking Enterprise, Sacramento County

What comes next: car sharing to eliminate rental vehicles

Sacramento County's next frontier is car sharing. Several county divisions share physical locations but maintain separate vehicle pools — vehicles assigned to individual departments that sit idle most of the time, just in case.

"We still have a number of low-use units out there. There are departments that share a geographical location, but have vehicles assigned to their individual departments just in case. We could absolutely find ways to manage this with a car sharing solution." — Joe Trujillo

Leech sees significant potential: "We believe if these departments have the convenience of being able to plan ahead and reserve vehicles, there's a huge potential to cut down on the number of vehicles."

By moving to a shared vehicle model enabled by Geotab telematics, Sacramento County aims to further reduce the rental fleet footprint and eliminate redundant vehicle ownership across co-located departments.

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