RTD Consultant’s Billings ‘Unreasonable,’ Audit Says

A controversial Metro Rail consultant who is a longtime associate of RTD General Manager John Dyer has billed the equivalent of 2 1/2 years’ work in a one-year period to the transit district and other clients, according to an internal audit released Friday.

Expressing concern about the “unreasonable” time charged--amounting to nearly 14 hours a day every day of the year--the auditors said the district should not pay $50,610 of more than $120,000 in labor charges billed to the district by consultant Charles Schimpeler. Since 1984, he has prepared ridership figures and environmental impact reports for the Metro Rail project.

The audit, conducted by the staff of the Southern California Rapid Transit District’s new inspector general, Ernesto Fuentes, also expressed concern about “the quality of work on the . . . project as a result of these unusually long working hours.”

“We question whether a staff person is able to work productively under such working conditions,” the audit says.

The auditors also said the district should not pay about $230,000 in bonuses billed to the district for Schimpeler and his partner in Schimpeler-Corradino Associates. The auditors claimed that they could find no permissible basis for the bonuses.

Dyer, who worked with Schimpeler on the much-criticized Miami Metro Rail project, strongly defended the consultant’s “outstanding” work and described him as a “workaholic.”

Despite reduced fee payment to the consultant, the district may still end up paying the Schimpeler firm additional funds because of other billing adjustments the auditors recommended in the firm’s favor.

The report was released one day after the RTD board approved a $2.2-million, one-year extension of the contract with Schimpeler-Corradino Associates. RTD officials said the billing issues were considered by the board before the members acted.

Agrees to Limits

As a result of the questions raised by the auditors and by reporters in recent months, Schimpeler has agreed to place limits on the total hours for which he claims payment, including those he bills to the district. Schimpeler said Friday that he also is offering not to seek payment for much of the disputed overtime.

“Because of the way you (journalists) reacted to it, I had to withdraw” the billings, he said.

But Schimpeler insisted that the hours were justifiable. In the period in question, Schimpeler said he worked long days Monday through Thursday for the RTD, then took a “red eye” flight to Miami where he worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the Dade County transit system. “There are a lot of 18-hour days in that; a lot of seven-day weeks,” he said.

But Gary Spivak, RTD’s planning director who supervises Schimpeler’s contract, said the consultant was billing questionable hours, such as time spent reading, that he should not have.

The billing controversy, which arose last year after a preliminary audit of Schimpeler’s books, is the latest in a series to dog the consultant, one of several people who followed Dyer to Los Angeles from Miami.

Off on Estimates

Schimpeler and Dyer worked together in Miami planning and promoting the first phase of that city’s $1-billion Metrorail system, regarded by many public transit experts as a costly failure. Schimpeler initially projected that about 200,000 riders a day would use the system, a figure that was widely used to promote that project. Actual ridership has been in the 30,000- to 35,000-a-day range, a difference Schimpeler blames on feeder bus services that never materialized.

Critics have also attacked Schimpeler’s Los Angeles Metro Rail ridership projections of about 300,000 a day when the system is complete. An independent consultant hired by the Los Angeles Times in 1984 estimated that those projections were at least 20% too high. Schimpeler says his Los Angeles ridership projections are “very, very sound.”