O.C. Agency’s Travel Policies Face Crackdown

Saying that lax travel policies have led to abuse and cost taxpayers thousands of dollars, county transportation officials are moving to crack down on unnecessary trips.

A staff recommendation to curtail travel comes a week after seven Orange County Transportation Authority employees attended a conference in Toronto, Canada, at a cost of about $14,000. Twice that number were authorized to make the trip, OCTA officials said, while three or four would have been adequate.

A review of travel policies at the OCTA also revealed that $180,111 was allegedly “hidden” in a training budget for the Orange County Transit District so that board members didn’t always know how many trips were undertaken by agency employees, according to Jim Kenan, director of finance and administration for the OCTA.

“As I looked into this,” Kenan said, “I wondered how this agency (OCTD) could operate with so many people absent so many days of the year.”

The review was prompted by the June merger of the Orange County Transit District and the Orange County Transportation Commission, which resulted in the formation of OCTA, and inquiries from OCTA Chairman Roger R. Stanton, a county supervisor who has long crusaded against unnecessary travel.

Stanton cited as an example of a wasteful trip an OCTD employee’s planned visit to Maine for nine workdays. The trip was approved even though the employee was not in line for any jobs that were the subject of the seminar involved.

Last week’s trip to Toronto involved the annual American Public Transit Assn. convention, which is generally considered the most important transportation conference of the year. OCTA board members Don R. Roth and Richard B. Edgar were authorized to go, but they dropped out.

An OCTA staff report to be aired at Thursday’s board meeting proposes that no more than five OCTA employees be allowed to attend a single event. Employees would have to arrange all trips through a central, OCTA travel coordinator, and all out-of-state trips must be approved in advance.

Until now, OCTA officials said, some staffers arranged airline flights based on their membership in various frequent flier programs instead of shopping around for the cheapest fares. The difference in the case of the Toronto trips was about $300 per ticket.

At the Oct. 17 meeting, OCTA board members will consider a revised 1991-92 travel budget of $489,000, 9% above last year’s combined levels for OCTD and the county Transportation Commission.

Kenan predicted that the OCTA travel budget would be slashed next year but declined to estimate by how much.

James P. Reichert, OCTA’s chief operating officer and OCTD’s general manager, denied he or any other officials had attempted to hide travel in the transit agency’s budget. “The board members knew what travel there was,” Reichert said. “I felt we always adequately explained the reasons for the travel.”

But Reichert also conceded that “there may have been a little confusion as to what was business travel and what was training.”

Before the June merger, Kenan was a member of the OCTC staff, which for years has been critical of transit district financing.

Kenan said he did not know what portion of the $180,111 listed as training-related travel in OCTD’s 1990-91 budget was unwarranted. Kenan and other county officials did not go through training records to determine what was valid or questionable. The amount of training-related travel was nearly as much as the $191,699 earmarked in the same budget for regular business and conference-related travel, which board members monitored more closely.

Kenan said that typically, when OCTD board members approved the agency’s training budgets, they did not know so many trips were included.

Stanton, who campaigned strongly for reforms when travel abuses by the county Pension Board were revealed earlier this year, said, “I have an uneasy feeling that in spite of my hammering away at the travel extravagance at OCTD, they were slipping things by me.”

Stanton served as an OCTD board member before the June merger.

While declining to criticize individuals, Stanton said OCTD has used travel as a reward to boost morale “and not for more direct benefits to taxpayers who foot the bill.”