It’s 5 p.m. Do you know where your city vehicles are? Increasingly detailed equipment tracking and monitoring technology wants to make that question a thing of the past for local governments. Samsara brought together public-sector leaders in Chicago on May 12 to learn about its suite of asset tracking and monitoring products, which are as simple as a Bluetooth-powered tag on an excavator or as intricate as an AI-enabled dashcam that sends an alert if a city staffer yawns behind the wheel. When New Orleans Operations Chief of Staff Shelita White began overseeing the city’s fleet around three years ago, she asked for a list of the city’s roughly 2,600 assets and was presented with a stack of papers on her desk, she said during a panel on modernizing state and local emergency response. “It was unnerving to me to know that we had 2,600 assets and we have no idea where they are,” White said. The city has since entered around 1,800 of its fleet assets into a real-time tracking system and is on pace to add the rest of its fleet by the end of this year, White said. “Being able to locate our assets is a very, very big deal,” White said. “It's something that the public wants to know. We get a lot of public records requests … We cannot give them a stack of papers. We cannot give them someone's Excel [spreadsheet] from two years ago that has something that is expired.” Such digital systems can now estimate how much gas is in each vehicle’s tank and whether any maintenance checks are pending, due or needed, said Andrew Morgan, who manages fleet operations for the Texas Department of Public Safety. That information can be critical when preparing for emergency situations like flooding, he said. “We