Countywide : Controls on OCTA Travel Are Urged

Concerned about absenteeism, County Supervisor Roger R. Stanton said Friday that he will seek tighter controls on out-of-town trips by county transportation officials.

Stanton intends to ask the Orange County Transportation Authority to track how many days each OCTA employee has been “off the job” before each new travel request is granted.

“One of the things I’m concerned about is not only the expense,” said Stanton, “but how often (employees) are off the job. It’s a hidden cost, and it’s one we’re not always aware of.”

Several OCTA administrators were absent more than 10 days in 1992 because of business-related travel, OCTA officials acknowledged earlier this week.

But they emphasized that after two quarters of the 1992-93 fiscal year, OCTA has spent less than 27% of its $469,410 travel budget.

Still, OCTA’s own internal memos suggest that oversights occur.

For example, a Jan. 27 report to OCTA’s Finance, Administration and Human Resources Committee noted that 10 staff members attended an annual American Public Transit Assn. conference in San Diego last October, despite a policy restricting the number of people who can attend the same meeting to five--except when approved by Stan Oftelie, OCTA chief executive officer.

That didn’t happen. Two of the attendees had no travel authorizations.

As a result, officials are now tracking planned attendance at individual events.

The quarterly reports show that one administrator, James P. Reichert, accumulated 36 travel days in the 1992 calendar year.

Another administrator, Judith McCourt, racked up 22 travel days, and Operations Manager John Catoe spent 16 days on the road. Financial analyst Deborah Christner traveled 35 days in 1992.

Part of McCourt’s time was spent in Minneapolis, helping a transit agency there cope with the new Americans with Disabilities Act, a set of regulations aimed at enhancing access to facilities and services, including transit, by people with physical disabilities.

“Minneapolis liked the way we set up our (Americans with Disabilities Act) system, and they asked for our help,” McCourt said.

She also attended a meeting in San Francisco on new, so-called intelligent vehicle and highway systems and annual American Public Transit Assn. conventions.

Said Catoe: “The trips are beneficial to the agency. . . . The employees in many cases were asked to go. They didn’t just say, ‘Oh goody, here’s a trip I can take.’ ”

“Each one of the trips was proper and had merit,” Oftelie said earlier this week. “But I’m not sure that, taken as a whole, so many absences are good for the agency.”

Oftelie said Stanton’s request to track each employee’s travel “is not a bad idea. It sounds fine.”

As a county supervisor who sits on the OCTA board, Stanton was the architect of the agency’s strict policy requiring advance board approval of most travel and use of budget fares and accommodations.

As a result of the stricter policies, said Oftelie, the number of trips--especially out of state--has “plummeted.”

But Stanton said Friday that there has been an obvious loophole in OCTA’s approach.

“We’ve had no mechanism for knowing how often people are away from their jobs for travel,” he said.

“It’s difficult to judge the quality of each one of these trips,” Stanton added.

“My concern would be that the managers who oversee these people determine that the meetings involved are of critical importance and ask what other things could these people be doing, and which is more valuable.”