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For many state and local governments, the recent economic crisis in the United States has caused revenues to decline while demand for services has increased to its highest level. Budget constraints forced many jurisdictions to institute painful funding cuts. However, some agencies have been able to develop strategies that trim spending while also maintaining—and often improving—the services on which so many constituents depend. Often these individual governments do not have time to document their cost saving approaches. And many governments that would be interested in using these approaches do not have adequate staff time to find them, nor to evaluate them.

The Urban Institute seeks to identify promising local and state government approaches for which sufficient available evidence demonstrates that costs are reduced without sacrificing service quality—and then share the results nationally. This report focuses on reducing police fuel consumption. Other reports in the series have focused on reducing police responses to false alarms and reducing inmate health care costs.