A 17-year-old vehicle-use policy needs to be revised, Clayton County police say, to avoid losing more officers to desk duty because they racked up too many accidents.

Clayton commissioners are expected to vote Tuesday night to amend the policy that assesses penalty points against employees who damage county-owned vehicles. The more serious the accident, the greater the number of points.

Most minor mishaps bring a three-point penalty; if the worker was "chargeable," or at fault, another three points are added. So any accident in which the employee is at fault can result in a penalty of at least six points.

After 11 points, an employee loses county driving privileges. This means, under the present policy, that only two minor at-fault accidents — backing into a pole twice, say — could take a police officer off the street for up to two years. (An accident stays on a civilian worker's record for three years.)

"If an employee has two chargeable wrecks, he or she cannot drive a county vehicle," said Ken Green, staff attorney for the Clayton County Police Department.

Green wants the points assigned for a preventable accident reduced from three to two. He said it would then take three minor crashes to take an employee off the road.

Two police officers are on the sidelines now because of the point system, and several others are just a few points away from sitting behind a desk, Green said. "We spend a lot of money training these officers, and we need them out patrolling the roads," he said.

Most preventable accidents are minor, said Katherine Dodson, Clayton's risk management director.

Dodson and Green worked together on the proposed policy changes, which add an education component.

Currently, employees operating county vehicles receive mandatory training once every three years.

Under the revised policy, after a crash, workers also would have to go for remedial training from an approved third-party provider — and could reduce their penalty points by half if they pay for the training out of their own pockets, Green said. A training fee schedule has yet to be determined.

"We would want the training to be specific to that accident," he said.

Clayton also may require workers who cause accidents to pay for vehicle repairs themselves if they were driving on personal time, Dodson said. Such payments would not affect the number of penalty points assessed.

Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell agreed something needs to be done, and suggested it also might be cheaper to install back-up monitors in some vehicles than to continue to pay high repair bills.