The City of Plano, TX requires employee to pay for their personal use of the city-issued phone. This is done either by monthly itemization of the bill or through a payroll deduction (flat fee).

Charlottesville has a policy that does not require but encourages employees to buy or use their own personal phones but the City will then reimburse them for use of a data plan to check email, make business calls, etc. The reimbursement is only for employees required to be available at anytime, such as department heads, etc. If an employee is not required to be available anytime, they may still have access to their work email but will not receive the reimbursement. This applies to smartphones only, too. The reimbursement is done through payroll deduction and is a flat fee.

Here is the City of Delaware cell phone policy.

The City of Phoenix requires employees to pay for their personal use of City mobile devices, itemized by call, by month. There is a flat per-minute fee that employees pay. Personal use is not encouraged.

The City of Chula Vista requires approval through the chain of command up to the City Manager for either cell phone stipends, or issuance of City provided cell phone. With City provided cell phones, employees must itemize their personal calls and reimburse the City for those perosonal calls. I've attached our City's policy.

We use a stipend system for cell phones. It's a tiered system, based on the type of usage (data, voice, combination) and it must be approved by the supervisor annually. The stipend is included in the employee's paycheck. The phone is then the employee's. They choose the carrier and the service level.

Attached is a copy of our Cell Phone Policy. Bills are send out each month and employees are required to reimbuse the City for personal calls that don't involve work. They may contact their wife, etc. to tell them they won't be home or need to work late without violating the policy. It is really based on the honor system. Good luck!

The city issues cell phones and prohibits personal use. It's time to review this in part due to the time and cost of city support to users and the question of the effectiveness of the prohibition.

While we do have some employees/departments such as police and fire who have city owned phones; we have just implemented a cell phone stipend policy where we are reimbursing employees, who through the course of their job use their personal cell phone. Oversight and control of who gets them is with each department director and they must qualify under the rules as outlined in the policy.

One cost savings now being realized; we have numerous pump stations with land-lines to them which we have been able to remove since we started using cell phones. Already we have seen a monthly savings over $600 with more to go. Attached is our policy.