Meals for 8 O.C. Officials Total $18,000

Orange County’s eight highest-ranking transportation officials spent more than $18,000 in taxpayer money last year on staff meetings held in restaurants and on entertainment for business and government leaders, according to a Times review of expense records.

In some cases, transportation officials dined with each other and billed taxpayers for the privilege, records show. At other times, they picked up the tab for lobbyists or executives doing business with county transportation agencies, including bond underwriters and engineers already being paid thousands of dollars through lucrative contracts.

The Orange County Transportation Authority’s chief financial officer, James A. Kenan, whose salary is $106,642 a year, spent $6,074.09 on meals, mostly with finance firms involved in OCTA’s Measure M bond sale last year. He also signed and approved his own reimbursements, as did OCTA Chief Executive Officer Stan Oftelie, who earns $131,608 a year and reported $2,783.91 in meal expenses.

Total spending for the eight officials--the top four from OCTA and the top four from the county’s separate Transportation Corridor Agency--reached $18,605.90.

“That’s a lot of tuna sandwiches,” said Supervisor Roger R. Stanton, who also serves as an OCTA board member and who spearheaded a clampdown on staff travel. “I’d want to go and talk to Stan and Jim about this.”

When told about the spending and that top OCTA officials approved their own expense accounts, OCTA Chairman Gary L. Hausdorfer said he would “move to correct any deficiencies in our policies.”

Still, Hausdorfer said, focusing on meal expenses should be balanced by OCTA’s successes in cutting costs elsewhere, including travel, and by its performance in delivering projects promised to voters--often millions of dollars under budget and months ahead of schedule.

Hausdorfer said some business meals are justified as the best, most efficient use of employee time. “OCTA should be more careful, however, in determining what discussions can and should take place in agency offices during regular business hours,” he added.

Transportation Corridor Agency officials said they see no problem with meal reimbursements. “We feel we got value for the money spent on meals,” spokesman Mike Stockstill said recently.

“Spending for meals was done as part of the normal and accepted practices of the TCA and is within the guidelines for such spending as previously established by the agency,” Stockstill added in a written statement issued last week.

Under longstanding policies at the transportation agencies, such reimbursements for meals are allowed. The cost of alcoholic beverages must be deducted from expense claims. The OCTA also requires its employees to deduct tips.

The meal expenses pale in comparison to those of the Los Angeles Transportation Commission, which spent more than $100,000 on meals and free doughnuts for staffers last year, provoking public outrage. Nevertheless, the OCTA and TCA meal tabs reflect a sharp difference between the liberal policies of Orange County’s two independent transportation agencies and the more restrictive policy set for employees of the County of Orange.

Under the purview of Steve Lewis, the county’s elected auditor-controller, the county’s policy bars reimbursements for meals except for those eaten during business trips outside the county. “Generally, you can’t pay for the meals of others and get reimbursed for it,” Lewis said.

Said Stanton: “I’m hearing about this for the first time, but my first reaction is that if we can live with (Lewis’ policy) at the county level, why can’t our independent agencies elsewhere in the county?”

The spending habits of officials at transportation agencies around the state prompted state Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco) to sponsor a bill this year to curb extravagant gifts and other perks.

Among the co-authors of the bill, which is expected to go before the Senate for a vote next week, are Assemblymen Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) and Mickey Conroy (R-Orange). The bill would prohibit the California Transportation Department from funneling money to agencies that have not adopted a policy restricting the use of public funds for entertainment, gifts and memberships in clubs or organizations.

It would also restrict the purchase of life insurance for board members and limit the amount of money spent on travel and air fare. The measure would prohibit agencies from spending public funds on food, beverages or lodging for people who are not employees or officers of the agency.

The Orange County Transportation Authority oversees more than $150 million a year in highway and transit spending, with most of the money coming from Measure M, the half-cent county sales tax approved by voters in 1990 for a 20-year list of traffic improvements.

The Transportation Corridor Agency oversees the construction of three South County toll roads that are funded mostly by developer fees and the sale of construction bonds.

The Times’ survey of expense reports showed that:

* Oftelie’s biggest meal tab was $135.75 at That Other Place, formerly known as Nieuport 17, on July 24, 1992. In attendance were Orange County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, OCTA board members Dana W. Reed and Chuck Smith, and an OCTA staffer. Oftelie listed the purpose as a committee meeting.

* Finance officer Kenan’s total expense tab is high, officials said, because he often used his credit card to pay for the meals of staff people and occasionally OCTA board members dining with him, as well as for three or four business executives at a time--especially on trips to Boston, New York and San Francisco.

* In comparison, the next highest-ranking OCTA officials--External Affairs Director Monte Ward and Planning and Development Director Lisa Mills--collected a combined total of only $313.60 for meals in 1992. Ward and Mills earn $91,374 each.

Kenan “does more out-of-town travel than most of us, and he dines often with heavy hitters--the people who helped us do the county’s second-biggest bond sale ever,” Oftelie said. “I don’t think such expenses are all that unusual.”

At the corridor agency, which has borrowed money from OCTA and other sources in the past to stay afloat, Executive Director William Woollett collected $2,786.40 in meal reimbursements, and construction chief Greg Henk was reimbursed $2,785.61 last year. Finance director Wally Kreutzen and public relations director Stockstill collected $1,967.27 and $1,895.02, respectively.

Woollett’s annual salary is $128,095. Henk is paid $105,685; Kreutzen, $104,603, and Stockstill, $88,732.

Records show that more than $500 of Woollett’s meal tabs involved discussions with members of his own staff, accompanied by officials of the county’s Environmental Management Agency, the Irvine Co. or Church Engineering, a tollway contractor.

Stockstill spent $135.25 last December at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Dana Point for a meal attended by Henk, Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad) and Packard aide Mike Eggers--who also serves as a Dana Point city councilman. The listed purpose: “Discuss federal issues.”

Stockstill, who is often the corridor agency’s point man on political issues, spent $124.89 on two meals for consultant Nancy Lucast and Coastal Commission member Linda Moulton-Patterson, shortly before Patterson led the commission’s vote to approve the San Joaquin Hills tollway.

Last July, OCTA’s Hausdorfer ordered his agency to halt committee meetings held in restaurants, but he said this week that his decision had nothing to do with meal spending.

“I just wanted to consolidate our meetings in one place, the OCTA offices, because we were having our meetings all over and it was confusing,” Hausdorfer said.